Candle

by John Barnes

  Resuna was trying to be reassuring, pointing out that it was always there to help, but help from a meme running in your brain, and help from the combined minds and resources of the entire Earth, are very different. When a big, strong, clever man may suddenly try to kill you, you really want the latter.

  On the other hand, if Lobo was coordinating his movements with the satellite gaps—and if he also knew about the dead one, and wasn't just coordinating by watching for them with binoculars and plotting orbits—then this was exactly the day and time he would be out, and the chances of my finding him were much better. The chances of catching him if I did find him were a different matter.

  After climbing for another hour, and checking out three more innocent stands of trees without finding any trace of Lobo, I had Resuna contact One True and check back through the files. Kelly and her mother had been attacked during a time when two satellites were fully up in the sky and in line of sight, so maybe Lobo didn't pay any attention to the gaps in coverage. Too, the remote photos of him had to have happened with a satellite above the horizon. And twice he had been photographed crossing a south-facing slope with a direct line of sight to Supra New York. Chances were he wasn't coordinating with satellite passes, so he was not unusually likely to be out, today.

  Just after two o'clock, not long after the first gap in satellite coverage, I was finally at the head of the old rockslide, a remnant cliff where a tower of volcanic tuff had fallen down sometime in the last century or so. I squatted down on a snow-covered boulder, looking out across the wide valley before me. The day was turning nastier, hard though that was to believe.

  Far below, on the flat floodplain around Dead Mule Creek, I could see the wild swirls of the little ground blizzards. In the old days there had been auto accidents because of those things; someone would come around a bend in the road on a clear day, and a smear of white would erase all vision just when someone else, similarly blinded, drifted across the center line, or when the road turned out to be occupied by a wandering steer, or when the next bend hid a school bus that had stopped to drop off a ranch kid. People didn't drive themselves anymore, and machines could see right through a ground blizzard or call up a satellite and look over the top, but still something evil, frightening, almost alive lurked in the white swirls, a kilometer across and a meter high, that alternately hid and exposed the frozen creek.

  I gobbled the macaroni and cheese, hamburg steak, peas, and warm apple tart of my mid-afternoon second lunch; Resuna informed me that this was what had once been called a "popular television dinner," but I didn't bother to find out what that meant. Every so often Resuna just hands you a fact, with nothing attached to it to explain why you should want to know. There are people in Sursumcorda, old-timers who turned late in life and perhaps not willingly, who whisper that it's a bug in the system. I always feel bad about having my copy of Resuna report them.

  The wind was rising. Minus ten Celsius, and falling. The firs on the slopes were whipping and dancing like mad drunks; the aspens bowed and bowed endlessly like compulsively obsequious servants; and even up here, high on the ridge without much snow upwind of me, the blowing snow was obscuring my view off and on.

  It was senseless to try to find any of Lobo's tracks now; the weather would erase most of them before I got there, and in this miserable visibility I would not be able to see whatever trace might be preserved in a sheltered hollow, or to the windward of a rock or tree. Yet there were still nearly four hours of daylight, and I really didn't want to just ski home and sit out the bad weather in the shelter.

  I could ski down the side of this ridge to where the old road joined with a larger road, far below where I had first picked up Lobo's tracks. A junction of two roads near a known sighting of a cowboy was a pretty good place to hunt. Furthermore, a check with satellite records showed that the terrain was reasonable—during most of the last portion I'd be following an old ski trail left over from one of the many abandoned resorts up here.

  Once I got down there, I'd just follow the old road back to a point near my camp. That would be mostly uphill and should take the rest of the afternoon, especially if it snowed more or the wind picked up. If I found nothing, no harm done—the odds had been against it anyway—and I would then just herringbone up the hill to my camp, get home just before dark, and turn in early that evening for a fresh start after the bad weather blew over.

  But maybe Lobo used the old road down below regularly, and watched it. If so, I might be able to ski into an ambush. If he didn't manage to kill me in the first few seconds—and the suit was projectile-resistant, especially for old-fashioned bullets at long range, and I was in great shape with my fighting skills freshly replenished—then backup units would come swarming in, and all I'd have to do would be to hold him long enough so that he could be captured.

  Then again, if by sheer bad luck a satellite blank spot coincided with falling into his ambush, that might just even the odds enough for him to get away—and for me to get dead. A lot can happen in a few seconds, and ten minutes can be forever in certain kinds of emergencies.

  I could have waited till the next day, when there would be only two very brief interruptions—but that would mean running the risk of having Lobo see the tracks, or even of following them back to my camp and taking me. It was possible that I still had surprise on my side, and that even if I didn't, he hadn't had time to either prepare to fight or to run. But an advantage of that kind spoils fast; you use it right now or you might as well have thrown it away.

  I pushed off toward the junction. Since I had the time, I treated myself to doing all kinds of hot-doggy stuff on my run down the hill, enjoying the experience as my own audience; long ago I'd have despised someone who did big, vigorous, show-offy turns like these, but back then, my knees hadn't hurt after a long day on skis.

  When I got down far enough to pick up the old ski trail, it was full of brush in the center, but along the north side, where the tall pines and firs shaded it during summer and the ice lay on the ground till late spring, it was still more than clear enough. And three or four meters of powder will cover most of the rocks, bushes, and odds and ends; probably in the old days, if this much snow had fallen, the people who owned and ran that abandoned ski resort would have thought they had died and gone to heaven. Chances were they had died, anyway, at least by now.

  Resuna, trying to give me a balanced view, kept talking about the ecological damage. It reminded me of the glaciers that had already eaten old towns like Crested Butte and Leadville, and might well bury towns as far south as Santa Fe before they were done, and the scablands that now covered the Rio Grande valley, caused by all the ice dams forming and breaking up on the tributaries that sent scouring floods down the river every third year or so.

  Me, I just enjoyed the fact that the deepest, most untouched snow I would ever encounter was all spread out in front of me, and it was all mine. I shot down that hill feeling more and more like a teenager, bouncing and bobbing, spraying huge rooster-tails of snow behind me—what the hell, it might conceivably call attention to me, and make it more likely that Lobo would set up the ambush that I would be trying to trip.

  After checking the satellite image of my path, I turned out of the old ski run with tremendous momentum and dashed across a small meadow, then shot through a grove of aspen. As I ascended the gentle slope up to a low saddle, I coasted to an almost-stop, let myself fall forward to conserve the last tiny bit of momentum, and then hurled myself up the slope in the closest thing to a flying herringbone you can do. In a few seconds I had covered the hundred meters or so to the top, and I coasted to a spot among the trees from which I looked down on the junction of the two old roads, an easy minute away, and rested for a moment.

  Resuna asked me why I enjoyed this so much. I tried to make sure that Resuna understood the exhilaration of running on your own best skills, far out from any other people, in spectacular country, but I had little hope that it would be such a compelling explanation that One True would allow
more people to come out to the wilderness. Better to pack humans together in cities, from an engineering and energy-efficiency standpoint, and the small amount of necessary pollution could be concentrated into a more easily handled point source. The all-but-mortally damaged ecology of the Earth just plain couldn't handle the extra load that tourists would impose, not just yet anyway. Probably, at best, I had supplied One True with something that it would want to introduce, as a "new" idea, in another generation or two when the Earth was well on its way back to health.

  I thought it was possible, too, that the experience of the run through the trees might be copied into quite a few people's memories. Like the little boy in Germany whose surprise birthday party, at age eight, was now part of everyone's experience of childhood, or Katie Rafter, the young woman whose wedding we all remembered from her viewpoint, I might be added in as the perfect backcountry skiing experience. Thanks to One True, nowadays everyone who really needed or wanted an experience could be assured of having a vivid memory of the best possible version of it. It was even possible that the total social benefit from my addition to the library might outweigh the contribution of bringing Lobo in.

  I leaned forward, pushed off, and slid onto the shallow slope beyond, skiing a single, big C—curve down onto the old road. In the low temperature, the fresh-fallen snow squeaked under my skis. A very dim circle of sun was appearing high in the sky in the south; you could almost imagine it might come out.

  Every cowboy hunter I ever knew agreed that there had to be a liny touch of the cowboy in every cowboy hunter, and I suppose that's true. I always had a streak of pride in me that Resuna could do nothing with. Just now, having made such a good run, that part of my nature was truly kicking in; I hoped that Lobo had seen me, partly because I wanted to attract his attention and flush him from cover, but also because—Resuna insisted that I admit this—because he was obviously a highly skilled, experienced outdoorsman, and I wanted his respect.

  I started trudging up the gentle slope of the old road, planting And pushing like a beginner. This wouldn't be nearly the fun that skiing down had been.

  I would have to move in an irregular pace, sometimes openly, sometimes with more stealth, sometimes rushing ahead and sometimes dogging it, to throw his rhythm off. It's easy to surprise a guy who moves along at a steady pace in a predictable path. It's harder when he's alternately rushing and dallying, hiding and showing himself, giving you too much data to analyze but not enough information to figure him out. We'd see if a cowboy could handle that any better than a hunter.

  For the next two hours, as I covered about half the distance hack to camp, I stuck with that plan. Now and again I'd skate hard and rush along like a rocket; every so often I'd just sit down and have something to eat. Sometimes I'd cut off a couple bends on the road by skiing across a meadow, thoroughly exposed to view; sometimes I'd climb up over a tree-covered ridge, taking it slow and disappearing for a while. Nothing happened; as Nordic skiing, it was moderately interesting, and as job performance, it was a flat zil.

  Another satellite gap passed quietly as I climbed over one of those ridges; nothing happened during that time except that I really had to poke around to find a way up, after discovering a big brush-fall in my path. From the top I did a big series of slow, graceful turns, killing time to throw his rhythm off. Maybe I threw it off so far that he never saw me at all, or wasn't there, I thought to Resuna.

  Resuna instantly pointed out that I was playing all the odds right and my job was to keep doing that; success would come eventually. I told it I felt like I was running Reader's Digest instead of Resuna.

  I had another cup of tomato soup. It's the most wonderful food there is, if you're skiing XC all day—hot water, salt, sugar, and a few vitamins and some flavor, all the essentials and nothing superfluous.

  By the time I hit the third satellite gap, I was starting to feel like the characters in the old flatscreen movies who say to each other, solemnly, that it's "quiet. Yeah. Too quiet." I wasn't far from where I'd found his trail the first day. Still no sign of him. Maybe he was off doing whatever it is that cowboys do when they aren't stealing from society, terrorizing homeowners, raping little girls, interfering with ecological reconstruction, and congratulating themselves on what fine free people they are because they don't have a copy of Resuna to tell them that they're acting badly. Maybe he was around the next bend.

  Adding to a sense of security that I knew to be false, the sun had burned through the nimbus layer, which had retreated rapidly to the east, leaving flocks of big thin mare's-tail cirrus scattered across the sky. The mare's-tails had chased after the nimbus in turn, and now the late afternoon sky was perfectly clear and blue; the sun was warming things up quickly; and at this very tail end of the afternoon, it was turning into a day I could enjoy.

  I was beginning to feel a certain affection for Lobo, anyway. He'd given me an excuse to be back out here, in this season, after all these years. Now and then I heard a thundering crash, as the little-added warmth undid some of the last-formed January's ice. Two ravens flew urgently, black shadows moving in straight lines against the perfect blue, wasting no time, because the carrion they eat is scattered and rare, winter kill that might be buried at any moment by another snowfall. Thanks to Lobo, I was getting one more look at it all.

  I stopped all to watch a bunch of big, thick icicles that had probably been growing in the depression in the cliff face since November, dripping in the sunlight, dropping water back into the little hot spring that had spawned them; it hissed now and then as a cold drop found a spot of hot rock. A little stream of steam rose from the spring and enveloped the icicles, but it looked to me like the sun was sweeping away the steam for the most part, and the icicles must be losing more to their dripping than they were gaining from condensation. The real widespread riot of life that is Rocky Mountain spring was still three months away, but the living things were joining the resistance against winter everywhere.

  Another bend brought me to a place where an elk herd had crossed; I stopped to have some coffee, being profligate with rations now that I had less than an hour to go back to camp. One set of very big tracks, three running to average, and one average set where the feet all came down closer together than they did in the others—looked like a bull, three cows, and a yearling. Probably the same ones I'd seen drinking from Dead Mule Creek the day before.

  The wind had died down. Other than the gurgle of coffee in my throat, and a far off flump from snow falling off trees now and then, there wasn't a sound. I might have stepped, for that moment, into a photograph. I looked up at the snow reflecting off the glaciers on the peaks, and thought that I'd have plenty of time to return to the shelter. My thigh muscles were hot from the exertion, but not in pain; the only part that hurt was the part that always does, my arches and insteps—there's something about the motion of skiing that just works those muscles harder than anything else, and I hadn't been on skis enough in the last few years to build the right muscles. It wasn't agony; just an annoying ache that made me look forward to taking aspirin before dinner, with maybe some wine to wash it down, and rubbing my legs with an analgesic ointment before bed.

  Well, since home was close, and now that the coffee had put more heart and attention in me, it was probably time to get going again. I pushed off and got into a nice big, slow skating motion, mostly keeping the poles tucked.

  A shape didn't quite work, but almost should have, in the bushes to the left of the trail up ahead—a human shape, lying down. His cammies were just slightly off, maybe, for the dirt he was lying on, or he was stretched out just a hair too much and the line of him against the line of the bush didn't look right, or something like that. You can't always explain how you know. The figure stretched out prone on the frozen mud of a windswept bare patch, among all that gray-green crunchy, broken sage, was undoubtedly a man.

  I kept skiing, just as I had been, though I felt like rough hands were squeezing my bowels. Right now I knew he was there, he knew I was h
ere, and I was one bare point up on him because I knew that he knew. He could take a shot at me from this distance, but if he did, the IR signature to the overhead satellite would give One True an exact fix on his location, and he had no way to know that I didn't have a dozen backups waiting to jump in. In less than three minutes, there'd be the third and final satellite gap of the day, but I didn't know whether he knew that, or had a way to know that, or cared. Regardless of whether he knew or cared or not, I didn't want to move into his ambush just as my communications with the outside world went dead.

  I couldn't even be sure that he had seen me, either. He hadn't moved a hair since I showed up. In my last remaining instant of satellite time before the gap, I called in a wide-angle image that covered a square kilometer centered on me over the last thirty seconds, zoomed onto him, blew it up, and saw that he hadn't moved at all for the whole time.

  I slipped off the road and behind a big heap of rocks, figuring I might as well try something. People have been known to fall asleep on watch. Just maybe that had happened, or he had zoned out one way or another. Maybe he was lying there with his eyes shut, and had not yet seen me at all. If and when he awoke, or opened his eyes, probably in just a few minutes, he'd see my tracks. But it was just possible that if I skied down the steep slope to my left—flashing through his field of vision for a few seconds—I could get behind a little crag that stuck out of the hillside there, scoot around it like a bunny, climb up the other side, and have him from behind. And if he did wake up and saw my tracks, I figured he wouldn't have time to move into any new ambush position; he'd have to either run, or slug it out from where he was.

  I pushed off down the steep slope, going as fast and straight as I could, to minimize my exposure.

  I bounded over a couple of bumps that hadn't been visible beneath the thick layer of powder, used them to change direction so that I'd present a somewhat worse target, and picked up as much speed as I could, the skis bouncing around on the edge of getting away from me.