by John Barnes
Normally, out in backcountry like this, to be safe, I'd have snowplowed down a slope like this, ski tips close together, trailing edges splayed, digging in with my inner edges to slow down, so that I'd have more control; but normally in backcountry the risk is twisting an ankle, not getting shot. I was going down this slope like an old-time bump skier used to go down the trashed-out prepared slopes, just as if this had been a carefully groomed safe area, with a rescue crew standing by and the ski patrol watching. The skis slammed against yet another bump. My knees felt older than the rest of me.
For a moment, I was sliding sideways, just over the line into out of control. Then I got the uphill edges carving into the snow again, drove the pole in hard and reversed direction in a stem christie, and rocketed down the last part of the slope to slip behind that crag. I turned back and forth until I was practically snowplowing uphill, and finally finished up, grabbing a quick deep breath through my raised face screen, facing an empty hill. There had been no shot; without the satellite contact I had no way to know whether he had even moved. I felt blind.
Resuna informed me that I had fourteen minutes, twelve seconds to go until I'd be back on-line with the next satellite. That was too long to wait for Lobo to come creeping around looking for me, so I got busy. I pushed slowly downslope around the crag, taking a couple of minutes about it, sticking as close as I could to the rock face to make my tracks less apparent and keep closer to cover; some of these cowboys were so primitive, back in the old days, that they had been using old pure-projectile rifles without augmented sighting, hypervelocity, or homing ammunition.
On one occasion I remembered, a cowboy had caught Sue D'Alessandro in the open and taken four shots at her without hitting her. That failed to cheer me. For all I knew, Lobo might have stolen good modern equipment.
I was still wondering why there had been no shots so far. Was he asleep? Had he had a heart attack while waiting for me up there? I wished I had an infrared shot from the satellite.
By the time I reached the bottom of the crag, I was crouched low and just barely gliding along, getting steadily more nervous. Resuna had started to chatter, trying to cheer me up, and I'd had to tell it to shut up, and let me have my whole mind to think with. The slope down to the creek below me was streaked with the blue shadows of the scattered trees and snowdrifts, reaching far across the glaring white. In less than ten minutes I would have satellite coverage again.
Trying to make haste slowly, I got off the snow onto some sheltered gravel and took a full minute to reset my flexis, putting them into the snowshoe configuration. It drained the stored power in my suit considerably, but with luck this whole thing would be settled in the next twenty minutes, and besides, I would be putting out a heavy load of body heat soon enough, which would get me recharged.
I stepped onto the snow; I hadn't let the flexi cool enough after reconfiguring, and it was hot enough to flash some of the snow to steam. The loud hiss and puff of vapor startled me, and I said "Shit," perfectly audibly. If the burst of steam and the bang hadn't given me away already, surely my voice had.
With cover blown, speed was all I had—and maybe unpredictability. I kicked off the flexis, dumped my pack, drew my tranquilizer gun, and set about climbing up over the crag, coping with an unfamiliar surface smeared with snow and ice, with a mixture of rotten stone. That first face was about twelve feet high, broken and irregular enough to be feasible for three-pointing, but not at all easy, and I was feeling the effects of the long day.
Still, nothing happened; no shot whizzed by, or pocked the rocks, or stung me. No one shouted. When I looked out at the rough, snow-covered slope, which I did in every spare second, I saw nothing moving and I might as well have been all alone.
After that first face, the upper part of the crag was a tumble of boulders, which I could scramble over on all fours, staying as low as I could, off the skyline. It was still a terribly long way to the top, and if Lobo came around, I was going to be a sitting duck up here on the rocks. I kept pushing and I have to admit that I was starting to feel the first nasty whispers of panic; Resuna moved in to soothe that.
Less than five minutes after having stupidly let off that puff of steam and given my position away, I was ready to poke my head out and take a look toward the brushy up slope above, where I had first seen Lobo. I drew a deep breath and let Resuna have its full effect, calming and preparing me; this was frightening, and I needed the clear head that Resuna could give me.
When I peered over the edge of the rocks, he was in exactly the same position. I raised my head further, and still he did nothing. He was still out of tranquilizer-gun range, so I couldn't just put a shot into him.
I adjusted the sun filter on my face mask and kicked up magnification. He was propped on his elbows in the snow; no one could possibly put both elbows down into snow like that, in a jacket that wasn't heated, and stay in that position for as long as he had; your hands would go to sleep and you wouldn't be able to grip anything, not to mention the excruciating pain after a while. I couldn't see his face because of the way his Stetson covered it, and all I could see of one hand was—what?
I notched magnification still further and zoomed in for a better look. That hand was oddly undetailed: perfectly smooth, without hairs, any unevenness in skin color, or wrinkles, and its shape was long and delicate, like a female model—or an old-type clothing-store mannequin—
I felt the terrible blow to the back of my head, and my eyes blurred and stung. Pure training and instinct made me try to roll over. I got onto my side, curling to protect my gut. I had just time to see a boot heel at the center of the crazy star of my shattering face-screen. I sucked in a breath, trying to get my arms and legs to answer me, before a second blow to the back of my head drove my broken face-screen forward into the snow. As the darkness smeared across my vision, and a big chunk of broken face-screen forced its way into my mouth and onto my tongue through my sore teeth and bruised lips, I could taste the icy tang of snow mixed with mud.
<> When I woke up, the only thing that I could remember with any certainty was that someone had given me soup one or more times during the indefinite period while my mind endlessly repeated a few disconnected, frightening images—things that floated in out of a dark, noisy void, then drifted back out. I had little idea where my body had been going or what it had been doing while my mind was bouncing aimlessly through the void.
I had been eating soup. Someone had fed it to me. I remembered the soup because I had been so embarrassed about throwing it up on myself, and on the hand and arm of the person feeding me.
That was another clue. I realized that I remembered big, gentle hands cleaning me off, and then more dreams in which I wandered down trails in dark forests—not the friendly, familiar night forest in which I had spent much of my working life, where I knew what everything was and could savor the sounds and smells, but the terrifying confusion of the forests of childhood nightmares.
But now I was definitely sliding back into the real world, and I didn't remember what I had been doing when I had left. The immediate environment in which I had been sleeping was chilly, but I was warm under covers. That brought back another memory: sometimes a soft, warm male voice urged me to crawl out of the covers, across a rough, cold floor, and use a chamber pot. Afterwards the same strong, weather-roughened hands that fed me would clean me up before putting me back to bed.
Now that I was aware of what had been going on and what I had been doing, I was also aware that the same events had been repeating for a while; I think I must have been given broth, and thrown it up, at least three times, perhaps more. Well, continuity of memory is one of the signs of recovering brain function, and to judge from the pain in the back of my scalp and the dull ache in the middle of my head, I must have had a pretty severe blow to the head.
I asked Resuna what had happened and what I should do.
Resuna wasn't there.
I was so frightened, and so shocked, that I fainted. When I woke again, I rea
ched for Resuna, and it still wasn't there. I thought about pulling the covers aside and looking around me, but that seemed like too much work, and I was already tired from worrying about where Resuna had gone. I let myself fall asleep again.
I'm not sure how many more intervals of lucidity like that I had in the next hours or days. Eventually I woke up and saw some light and heard some noise. The presence of reality was almost as comforting as the presence of Resuna would have been, and later, when I ate, the world seemed almost normal.
It was still a very long, indeterminate time—I'd have guessed at least two or three more days—until I was conscious for any period longer than five minutes at a time. When a brain takes a hard blow—and a mind loses its controlling meme—it takes days or even weeks for anything beyond the most basic functions to be restored. By the point where I remembered the last few days, and realizing that I must be still up in the mountains, my time sense was coming back, so that I was beginning to group my experiences into day and night. For some stretch of time, Lobo—I had realized that I must be his prisoner—would go in and out frequently, about one errand or another. Probably I was lying in an important work or living area of his. Then the lights would be off and Lobo wouldn't come; that must be the time while he slept. Most likely were that "Lobo active, lights on" versus "Lobo absent, lights off" corresponded to day and night—I just didn't know which went with which.
One day the soup was good but different—I found chunks of meat, jackrabbit I thought, plus bits of wild greens that he must have gathered and dried, and a flavor I finally identified as canned stewed tomatoes. With irradiation and non-reacting containers, canned stuff was good for centuries, so it wasn't surprising that it was edible, but it was surprising that somewhere he had acquired several years' stock of it. That information was vital—it helped to explain how a man could be living off the land in the high Rockies and not come down with scurvy—but there was no Resuna to upload the information to One True.
After a while I was able to look around and see the room. It was a refinished cave, probably an old earthquake crack or maybe an old mine shaft, and the part I could see was pritnear ten meters long by three high by four wide, quite a big space. Iron pipes gurgled all around the walls, and when I put a hand on one next to the bed it was very warm, though not hot enough to burn. That answered one riddle: he was keeping his place warm with a combination of good insulation and water from some hot spring, and it wasn't visible to a satellite because it looked like every other hot spring.
The walls were lined with forty-year-old canned goods, all with that silly "atom" sign that meant that they had been irradiated—in the old days, when people were allowed to have any old set of irrational fears they wanted to, with no Resuna to keep them in tune with reality, so many people had been afraid of irradiated food that the government had required those labels—I guess so that people could avoid clean, safe irradiated food and enjoy stuff that might be spoiled or contaminated instead. Nowadays the food was exactly as safe as it had ever been, and Resuna kept you from worrying.
Any place on the wall where there wasn't a shelf of food, there were portraits of people. Out of habit, I reached for Resuna to tell me who they were. Once again, I was all alone in my mind. I pulled the covers over my head, curled up tightly, and went back to sleep.
When I woke again, my eyes were focusing, my head ached only slightly, I could form more or less coherent thoughts, and Resuna was still not there. For the first time in a long time I had had many hours of real sleep, not the torment of half-waking nightmares. Almost, if I hadn't felt so lonely in the absence of Resuna, I'd have been comfortable.
Lobo came in, looked at me for a moment, and something must have been different in my facial expression. "I did hit the back of your head hard enough to kill any normal person," he said, with what sounded like mild frustration, "I'm sure of it. But I guess you're a hard-headed man, Currie Curran, and even though by all rights you ought to have a fractured skull, all you got was a concussion." He looked intently into my eyes, as if he thought I might explain what had gone wrong; after a breath, he said, "Looks like you're feeling better."
"You're Lobo," I said, unable to think of anything any smarter to say.
"Stupid name I gave myself when I was just a kid," he said, obviously embarrassed. "I guess I'm lucky I didn't end up as the Masked Avenger or something. My real name is Dave Singleton, if you want to use it." He was carrying something under his arm, and when he brought it closer, I saw he had a loaf of fresh bread, a cutting board, and a knife. "You going to be reasonable, Curran, and not go grabbing for the knife? If you say yes, we can share this while it's warm."
"Deal."
He sat down and sawed off a couple big slices, handing them to me. They tasted wonderful. He cut a couple for himself, ate quietly for a while, then said, "Funny thing. You might say I'm the reason for your existence. I'm the last cowboy, at least I think, and therefore, Curran, you're the last cowboy hunter. But then if you weren't hunting me, I'd just be a damned eccentric living out in the woods, so I guess you're the reason why I'm a cowboy, at least as much as I'm the reason why you're a cowboy hunter."
I let what he had said lay there between us. Too much response, too soon, kills most people's urge to talk, and I needed to learn many things that I'd only get if he told me.
I wanted to know why I was still alive; if he had been able to bring me back here, to nurse me back to life, he could just as easily have carried me far enough away so that my transponder wouldn't lead people to his hiding place, say to some stretch of thin ice on a mountain lake. Then he could have filled my outside suit with rocks and pushed me under. Probably nobody would ever have found me, and I'd just be another one of those hunters that disappeared during a satellite blackout. In the condition I'd been in, I'd never've even known he was doing it.
So why hadn't he? I could think of absolutely nothing that a cowboy would want with a living cowboy hunter. He ought to know—would know, to have survived so long—that because the individual parts of One True are nothing, there is no point in trying to take one of them hostage. One True will just lose the part, direct the individual copies of One True to comfort the mourners, and go on.
After a long while of just sitting together, during which he said nothing and I said nothing, I was unable to think of a more subtle approach, so I just asked, "Why didn't you kill me, Dave?"
The big man shrugged. "Well, I guess I had a bunch of reasons, but none of them sound all that good to me right now. Probably I'm just being stupid and acting contrary to my own interests. Most likely it's because I've got this great big phobia: I'm real, real, real afraid of dying by being hurt so bad I can't take care of myself, and starving or freezing a short way from home. It's what all my nightmares are about, and whenever something goes wrong, or I get sick or have a near-miss accident, it's the first thing I worry about.
"So I'd just hit you real hard and you weren't moving, and I checked you for a pulse, and damn, you had one. Well, I could've just pulled the electrets out of your suit, opened the heat reservoirs, and left you to freeze. I could have gone real low tech and cut your throat. Either of those would have made perfect sense. Instead I looked down at you and said to myself, he's going to die here, helpless with no one to find him. I can't just leave him.
"Well, I told myself I was just being silly and sentimental, but once I had let myself feel that I couldn't leave you to die in the snow far away from any help, the feeling carried over, I guess I'd have to say, to other ideas, so that I also felt funny about banging your head with that log again. Once you start caring how you kill somebody, I guess, you're already starting to think about not killing them, if you see what I mean, and—there I was. The moment was past. The blood was cold. I plain old flat out couldn't do it, at least not out there in the snow, far away from help or friends, where you might never be found. Not right there and then, anyway, not unless I really had to.
"Now, mind you, I might still take you out and slit
your throat, later, but if I do, it'll be quick and clean, and you won't just lie there dying for hours, and I'll put you someplace where they'll find you and your family and friends won't have to wonder what happened. I haven't entirely made up my mind on that."
I kept my expression as neutral as I could, just like they taught us in training. "I see your problem, Dave. Is there anything I can do to, uh, influence this decision?" I was desperately trying to cue up Resuna for advice, but Resuna remained absent.
"No," Lobo said. "You can try but I'm not sure the ideas you'd have to use, and think of, would come naturally to you. How many years have you been running Resuna?"
"Twenty-six years next November, but, uh, I don't think I'm running Resuna right now."
Lobo looked at me curiously. "That was the impression I had, but I wasn't sure how to ask you. Usually Resuna has more options than the native personality, and it can recover faster; I expected to talk to Resuna whenever you finally came around, and to have to ask it to let me talk to you. But ... you mean it's quiet in your head? Nobody in there but you, listening or talking?"
I shrugged. "I can remember Resuna's voice, but I can't seem to get it back. And I've been trying for a while, so it's not some temporary thing."
"Interesting. Who'd've thought a cowboy hunter, of all people, would be a good candidate for dememing? More bread?"
"Sure. You're a good cook."
"Not much else to do out here but please myself, and I'm sort of a fussy guy, or I was in the old days." He cut me off another chunk; I ate it more slowly than the last, savoring how good it was. I reflexively reached to store the experience with Resuna, and again it wasn't there.
Dave—I was starting to think of him as that, rather than Lobo—was staring at me, obviously curious, tugging at his lower lip with its few days stubble of beard. His hands were clean, though heavily callused, and his trimmed-short fingernails had no dirt under them. "You just tried to call up Resuna, again, didn't you?"
