Candle

by John Barnes

  I looked at them in everything from infrared to X ray, and they looked pretty much like any herd of elk, eating, in late winter or early spring.

  The most natural thing in the world...

  That was what, somehow, Lobo must be managing to look like. Even back in the 2030s, satellite optics and computers had been good enough so that they could designate individual buffalo and elk for the Doleworkers to cull from the herds. Something the size of a human being, dressed only in regular cold-weather clothing, couldn't possibly remain concealed from overhead satellites for more than a decade, and yet obviously something had.

  He must still have a working insulating/storage suit, and somewhere to run a heat exchanger that wasn't noticeable. That meant in turn he had to have somewhere to charge his suit, and that meant a not-very-likely sizable power source someplace. He couldn't be stealing off the grid because that would be noticed immediately, but most kinds of generators, electrets, or batteries were just as visible from orbit, more visible even than the man himself would be.

  Or maybe I was thinking too much like a modern, civilized cowboy hunter, and not enough like a crazy but very smart cowboy. I tried to come at the problem another way and think about how small a profile he would have to have to remain concealed—that is, how small must he look to sensors and screens in order to be lumped into the landscape?

  What if he had gone completely wild, living out there with a flint-tipped spear, building fires only far back under rock shelves, sleeping on the ground, acting like a Paleolithic hunter who was afraid of high-flying predators that could see in the infrared?

  Then where had his clothes come from, and how had his beard been trimmed neatly, when he turned up again? More to the point, human beings are big animals, and the satellites and databases did track big animals individually, so why hadn't they tracked Lobo?

  Elk, bear, buffalo, moose, mustang, deer, wolf, coyote, mountain goat, bighorn, cougar—those, according to Resuna when it checked with One True, were the animals in the immediate area who were regularly tracked as individuals rather than as herds or flocks. All of them took up more than a square meter, had mammalian body temperatures, and massed over twenty kilos.

  Lobo had to take up something close to two square meters every time he lay down—and you can hardly survive by hunting if you don't lie down now and then. If he was ever out of an insulating suit, he was more than warm enough to register on infrared. And even as gaunt as he had gotten, he must still mass at least seventy kilos. He was way over the threshold where he should have been detectable.

  He must have a way of looking, to any satellite overhead, like anything else you would find in the wild country out here. He had to have had it for most of a decade. And whatever it was, it must have gotten lost or stopped working recently, bringing him out into the open.

  Resuna remained absolutely quiet and let me work through it; very likely One True had already had some of these thoughts and was waiting to see if I came up with a different answer, or even a better one. After a while I was forced to concede that I still didn't have a clue, and I gingerly stood up, afraid that some of the surface under me might give again. I couldn't climb down the slide, since it was bound to be unstable for a couple of days, and death in a small slide is not much of an improvement over death in a full-fledged avalanche. Probably I should work my way down across the gentler slope to the west.

  I got out the flexis and set them to configure as Nordic skis, plugging them into my suit and letting them take their time about forming up. The elk, below, finished their morning elk-business, and formed a straggly procession going back up the slope. For a moment I wondered, idly, if Lobo might have disguised himself to look, at least to overhead satellites, like some common animal; but the thought of Lobo crouching out there in an elk suit seemed just too wildly improbable.

  The flexis had set and cooled into skis, so I unplugged them, strapped them on, and pulled out the extensor poles and telescoped them into position. Trying to hold it to one unpleasant surprise this morning, I took it very slow and easy.

  This whole area had been pretty much abandoned in the aftermath of the Eurowar, when so many people fled into the cities for law and order and their share at the food distribution centers; now, ninety years later, it was "natural" insofar as what was happening out here was wild and unmanaged.

  But it wasn't anything like it might have "naturally" been. The first decade or so after the war, before blight-resistant cover plants had been bred back into existence, had been bad for the land. Many shallow draws had been cut by water into deep ravines and gullies, and after cover had begun to grow again, it had taken many slopes some decades to re-shape.

  The loads of silt and mud had altered the rivers as well, aging them rapidly, making them wind and twist in strange patterns that shouldn't have happened for another ice age or two—and the growth of the new glaciers on the highest peaks had put still another stress on the Colorado mountains. Add to that the fires in the dead forests, and the sudden surges and retreats of a dozen bio-engineered plant species as they fought with a variety of non-native weeds and some species that were probably escaped ecoweapons, and it had been past 2025 before you could predict what might be growing where—if anything was—anywhere in the high country, and almost up to the beginning of the War of the Memes, a quarter-century beyond that, before field ecologists were writing with any assurance about what was out here.

  The animals had recovered quickly enough; between the Die-Off and the Eurowar, plus the epidemics that had followed in its wake, the area hadn't been much needed by people, so as soon as there were plants for food and cover, animal populations had surged back. With so many cities and settlements deserted, and much less land under cultivation, they had migrated freely, and by the beginning of the War of the Memes the grizzly and wolf were all the way back to the old Mexican border, and the herds of buffalo were again beginning to carpet the Great Plains as they had two centuries before. And yet the differences remained: wild longhorns in Texas, a huge wolf-dog-coyote crossbreed that ranged from the Rio Grande to the Platte, bigger and stronger mustangs thanks to the infusion of domestic draft horses. Any forester could have pointed out any number of things different from what they had been a century ago, in any part of the drainage.

  My first long glide across the slope was successful; the snow skidded out from under my skis no more than one might expect, the edges bit into the sun-formed crust easily enough, and by the end of that first swoop I was perhaps ten meters lower, and a quarter of a kilometer to the west. I made a big, awkward, snowplow turn like a beginner to avoid having any speed at all as I swung back east; the snow would be deeper now and I intended to take it at a steeper angle, so as not to be up here all day. Again it held, with one scary moment when I slipped sideways for a few seconds on some thicker crust, and now I was down into the heavy, partially-refrozen, pellet-like corn snow that you have to expect on a southern exposure this time of year. It's treacherous, but it can be managed. A few more wide, slow, careful turns brought me down to where the ground began to level off into a gentler slope toward the creek.

  The satellite passing overhead told me, via Resuna, that nothing was visible anywhere, but I didn't entirely trust that. Many cowboys, especially the loners of the last few years of hunting, had become pretty fair jackleg mechanics, and every now and then one of them thought of something simple and effective—it had to be simple because they didn't have the resources to do anything sophisticated, and if it wasn't effective, they didn't last long between the mountains and the hunters.

  Of course, Lobo was out in the open, now. So maybe whatever his miracle gadget was, it had broken down, and now it would be just a routine hunt. But just as possibly he was showing himself for some other reason entirely. I resolved to try to work as if he might be within fifty meters of me, all the time, and take it slow and easy. I would be looking for anything that resembled tracks—but at the same time I would be leaving mine, and I knew that I didn't have any wa
y of hiding my tracks, whatever Lobo might be able to do.

  Now that I was down in the easier country, I pushed off and skated slowly and carefully westward. There was some old sandstone in the local surface rock, and it was possible he might have found a cave somewhere, or even dug one if he had somewhere to hide his debris pile. Some mining claims went back 150 years and more—perhaps he'd found some old tunnel to move into. But that would only explain where he slept and holed up; how did he move around without being detected?

  Well, when in doubt, start with basics. People eat. Lobo had to have been eating something. What he was eating had to be either stolen food, stored food, or wild food. I didn't believe he could steal for more than a decade and not come to One True's attention before this. Ten years of food is a lot to store somewhere. That left wild food—hunting and gathering. So he was relying on wild game, especially in the winter.

  The best place to find wild game is where it drinks, so I decided to take a brief patrol along the creek.

  I took my time getting there, going downhill in safe, slow snowplows almost as often as I paralleled. If I screwed up on this first day—twisted an ankle or something and had to be rescued—I would be humiliated by having let One True down, and embarrassed by the mess that would be made of the hunt by having to bring a diskster up here. Worse, I would be out of action and somebody else would get my cowboy.

  <> An hour and a half later, it was almost noon. I was sweating buckets into the suit, the charge in the electrets was at 100%, all heat reservoirs were likewise full, and I had turned off the pre-warmer on the air circulator because I needed the cooling from breathing the mountain air.

  I only had to go two kilometers down the elk trail to Dead Mule Creek, but that was plenty. Elk do not have a skier's idea of what is a usable trail. The pathway wove through stands of trees, broke from brush on one side of a meadow and, after disappearing among a stand of young aspen, took a plunge down a bank into dense undergrowth.

  When I finally came down through a bunch of beaver-felled aspen to the bank, the sun was high in the sky, and I was hot and uncomfortable. But a quick scan showed no trace of Lobo, nor any other human being. Probably there wasn't a single person between me and Mary, in the cabin a hundred and ten kilometers away—this part of the world had always been empty and in the past century it had gotten emptier.

  At best I would have two hours down here before I would need to start working my way back to base, but then my opponent had only a very limited amount of time when he could move around, too. The chances of our both being in the same place during those brief periods were pretty slim. But I only had to catch him once, and he had to evade me every day. If I didn't catch him for a whole year, he could be ahead of me 365-1 at the moment I collared him—and I would still be the winner. Patience would do the job, more than anything else.

  Down here by the stream, the warmer air had made a mess of the snow. When you're trying to stalk someone, it's hard to believe how many ways heavily weathered snow can be frustrating. It crunches constantly, breaks with loud cracks, and makes appalling squealing and grinding sounds against your skis. It grabs unpredictably, always threatening to dump you on your butt. If you fall down it makes a noise like a giant folding a garbage truck. If you don't fall down you still leave painfully sharp and clear tracks. Every so often it turns into sheet ice that can send you rocketing downslope, struggling for control.

  Soon I was thinking too much about my skiing and not enough about my hunting. I finally got a clear view of a path down to the creek, and shot down it, alternately snow-plowing and paralleling as best I could, turning often in big wide turns, bouncing around on the slope like a rubber ball down a storm culvert.

  I was watching for somewhere good to pull into, and not finding it, so I kept trying to slow down—which wasn't so easy either. The snow under my skis screamed, thumped, skittered, and sprayed, giving me no solid grip; I was staying upright almost purely on balance. At least I was cooling off. The air coming in through my breather was almost clean and cold.

  I turned up onto a rise to spill some speed, climbing up and then doing quick loop turns back down. The winding creek was still some distance below me, but the clumps of tall pines were much farther apart now, and there looked to be a nice, easy path at a reasonable slope. I had skied for almost a quarter-kilometer before I realized I must be on some long-abandoned road. In another hundred meters, I saw something by the roadside, and almost didn't believe it. I circled back and checked again.

  There, partly covered by the snow, was a badly smudged print where something had been slipping down a gravel bank and had to brace itself. It was too wide for elk or deer, and had no claw marks like a bear; the heel was suggestively narrow where it had stamped in hard. And not far from that—again, the distance of something under half a meter suggested a lot—another smudged print, presumably where he had boosted himself back up. That clinched that it wasn't a bear—the weight, marked by the deepest depression, was much too far forward in the track. I searched in that area for another half hour and turned up three more badly smudged prints.

  Squatting down till my eye was almost at snow level, I looked toward the creek. Farther down the hill a low, chaotic mess of crumpled and broken snow, less than two meters across, told me my man had taken a flying somersault after leaping the road.

  Judging by what was packed into the shadow side of his tracks, he was using one very-low-tech method of evading detection—going out during snowstorms, so that most of his track would disappear to satellite observation before the clouds cleared.

  The pattern argued that he had been descending when he passed this point, on the way to somewhere else, but I had no way to know how often he went there. Possibly he often took this path—or would, until the first time he saw my ski tracks leading up to it.

  I skied back a short distance, feeling that odd prickle you get when it's a distant but not zero probability that someone will shoot at you. This area looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card—the vivid cobalt sky, the absolutely white snow, the greens shading from sun-spattered forest to nearly black in the shadows. The road behind me, leading up eventually to the ridge where my camp was, despite all the bright eye-stabbing daylight, looked suddenly weird, threatening, and hostile, the way a path through a public park at night looks to a young child.

  Resuna steadied my nerves. I felt all my skills come to the forefront of my mind.

  I found a place where I could climb the hill, just about twenty-five meters back, and herringboned up onto the bank. Remembering that Lobo himself had slipped, I stayed wide of the road.

  If he didn't come this way often, the track was information but useless; if he did, the information would be useless to me the first time he saw my ski tracks. So I had to follow his trail in one direction or another, right now. The melting on the edges of a couple of the tracks had suggested that they were days old.

  I picked up his trail easily enough; he was moving from rock to bare dirt to snow, stepping from one to the other in an irregular pattern, so that an AI looking at satellite photos was unlikely to see any pattern to it (especially since only the tracks in the snow would show well from orbit). But to the naked human eye, looking up the slope and just letting things have enough time to group and arrange themselves, the pattern was perfectly obvious. I could see his track or tracks—my guess was that he had been this way many times more than once—right up to where the ridgeline slashed the pure blue winter sky. I felt like whooping for pure joy. That's the way it feels when you know that One True has put you right where you most belong.

  Lobo was clever, and he'd had a long run of making no mistakes at all, but all runs come to an end. Though, hell, even this didn't really count as a mistake; just one of those inevitable things that has to happen because no one can control everything. If I had the good fortune to bring him in, especially if when I brought him in he was still in shape fit to be turned, then at the cowboy hunter reunions I would have a tale to tell that sur
passed anyone else's.

  I checked my time. It was nearly 3:30 P.M.; the sun would be setting in two hours.

  I doubted that I could follow his track clear up the hill before dark, but I had to try. This was clearly a frequent path for him, and he couldn't fail to miss my tracks when he came this way next. I had to push as far as I could, and find a place to set up an ambush the next day, or even tonight if it looked promising enough.

  According to the satellite map on my face screen, his path angled slightly toward my camp. That meant a shorter haul back to base, a longer time I could stay out, possibly an easier position for the ambush. On the other hand, I would be going uphill, crossing ridgelines, and if he happened to be on this path ahead of me, he would be the one with a perfect ambush.

  I shrugged and got going. You have to not only be lucky, but feel lucky, to hunt cowboys. And on this beautiful day, I didn't think I could feel anything but lucky.

  I could be up all night, if I had to, anyway.

  Herringboning is an efficient way to climb a hill in the snow, but efficiency is relative—all you can really say for it is that it is easier than boots or snowshoes. It's still lots of work. By the time I cleared the first ridgeline and could look on up the slope to the next—and to the distant white peak that gleamed over it for a moment—I was sweating as if I'd been stoking a furnace. Resuna adjusted my inner thermometer, but nothing compensated for the heat produced in my large muscles. The suit's heat storage was at 120%, which is 10% more than when you're supposed to stop and dump heat.

  I moved into the shadow of a large boulder, took off the radiator, set it on the ground, and shoveled snow onto it. The snow flashed off. I did that several times, each time releasing a cloud of white vapor, which might give my position away if Lobo just happened to be right in the neighborhood and looking right at me, but if I got rid of enough heat, I would again be able to breathe and function without having a telltale infrared signature.