Candle

by John Barnes

  "Well, I suppose that One True can drag people around like puppets if it wants to," I said, "but that's a terribly inefficient way to work, like teaching a dog to walk on a leash by dragging it down the sidewalk—it works after a fashion but it's better to have cooperation."

  "But if you didn't want to cooperate, why did you join it?"

  A thought clicked: if I were to tell a story that took all night, I could buy hours of time. Not to mention maybe get some more sympathy built up. It wasn't the greatest strategy I'd ever thought up, I knew, but it was one more strategy than I'd had a minute ago. "Well," I said, "it's a complex story, which isn't a bad thing, in my situation. I never ran One True back when it was brain-native. Like most people, I got Resuna and joined One True, rather than running One True in the years before Year One, and then converting to Resuna. I got Resuna just a few months before most people did—right at the end of the War of the Memes. But all the same, I wasn't one of those that had to be forced. I accepted it knowing what I was getting into. That has to do with my second wife, Mary."

  "She was running Resuna?" Lobo asked, settling back for a story. Cowboys spent their lives, until they were caught, with just a few people, out in the woods; telling a good story was probably important for them. It was that way with cowboy hunters, too. And realizing that you have a good audience, you always put on more of a show.

  "Mary was one of the first fifty thousand people or so ever to run Resuna," I said, not bothering to hide the pride in my voice. "And at the time I met her, I was one of the most evil people I had ever met, anywhere in the world, and she was one of the best—and I knew I had to get what she had, one way or another. Now, when I say 'evil,' I don't just mean not integrated into One True, and I don't just mean I had bad habits. What I mean is that, objectively speaking, somebody should really have killed me and put both me and the world out of our mutual misery. And in a sense, that's what Mary did with Resuna—killed the old me. It was a me well lost, if you see what I mean."

  He seemed to sink further into his chair to hear the story; after checking to make sure I was set for coffee, he gestured for me to get on with it. I doubt anyone ever had a better audience. I kept talking till the tale was told, interrupted now and then by a question or some coffee or a pee break. Judging by his expression, and the questions he asked, I don't think he missed a word of it. Funny what not hearing a new story in so long will do to a human mind.

  "To begin at the beginning," I began, "I'm a foundling, like most of our generation—I was dumped at the orphanage in Spokane Dome when I was a few weeks old, in April 2038. Besides the blanket and diaper I was wrapped in, and the child's crash seat I was tied into, the only other thing I arrived with was my name, written in Magic Marker on the back of the seat: "BABY NAME: CURRIE CURTIS CURRAN." The world had been in a severe depression for some years, so armies of babies arrived at the orphanage more or less like me. At least I didn't have any of the common HIV strains and wasn't born addicted to cocaine or You-4, and had no birth defects caused by my mother using gressors. And I was healthy, decently fed, and clean, so I guess Mom, whoever she was, just couldn't keep me and that was all there was to it."

  Dave grinned. "You and me could be brothers, you know," he said. "That's pretty much how I got my start at Denver Dome. The Gray Decade sure was no time to be a kid, was it?"

  "Got that right," I agreed, "pos-def. And I was nowhere near the worst part of it."

  The 2040s were one of the worst decades of peace the world ever knew. The long false prosperity that had been sustained by constructing the supras, the transfer ships, and the colonies on the other planets, and by the huge process of ecological rescue on Earth, had all been financed on borrowed money, and though the world had far more stuff than it had had before, and was a better and more prosperous place than it would otherwise have been, the re-formation of the Earth into a better home for humanity and all other living things, after the disastrous Eurowar, had been a giant, everyone-in-on-it Ponzi scheme, which had worked well enough in the 2010s and 2020s but now was absolutely out of suckers.

  The whole human race, on Earth and in space, was trapped in a set of paradoxes inherited from Reconstruction. Great wealth did not provide enough revenue to pay off on the bonds; astonishing productivity made goods too cheap for anyone to make a living selling them. It cost almost nothing to feed and clothe people, but investment and development, let alone further progress in restabilizing the ecology and getting energy production and industry moved to space, were on hold for the next half generation.

  Only a few people here and there starved, but only a very few worked, and almost no one dreamed. Mostly the world sat on its haunches and tried to figure out what to do to get going again. The lucky ones left for Mars, the Moon, Ceres, or Europa; a few continued the now-losing battle against the whipsawing global disaster that was the heritage of the Eurowar and now decades out of control. Glaciers formed in a matter of weeks in the fall and melted almost as fast in the spring, deserts leaped their ancient boundaries to advance deep into agricultural land, the seas were covered with blooms of organisms never seen before, and strange new diseases devastated plants and animals every few years, giving nothing alive any chance to work toward stability before the rolling catastrophes tore up the rule book yet again. Some scientists and engineers, with such resources as a world in a state of economic gridlock could throw to them, were trying to do things about that; many more would have been glad to help, but had to eat, and so they fixed potholes, picked up litter, or just collected a Dole check, while their skills went to waste.

  Whenever two people who lived through them start to talk about the terrible thirty years that began with the Panic of '32 and ended with the Second Diaspora, Resuna, and forced unification, it isn't long before their minds turn to something that's too far away in time and not far away enough in memory, and they start staring into space and sometimes don't come back.

  Back in the regular world, that's when your copy of Resuna shakes you out of it, dumps in serotonin and norepinephrin, and gives you a big, warm mental hug. Without that, I guess we'd have lived anyway, but in a cold, bleak world. This was what it was like without Resuna. Here I was, seated in a bath, warm, comfortable, well-fed, with pleasant idleness to tell stories (even if it was between cowboy and hunter)—able to think of nothing but the sufferings of people who had mostly been in their graves for decades, and to taste only the ashes of the lost world.

  "You ever wonder how different the world might've been if there hadn't been a war, or if somebody'd figured a way not to go through the Gray Decade, or any of that?" Lobo asked.

  "Yeah, always," I said. "Even when I've got Resuna there to help me through it. Well, anyway, you know what those years were like as well as I do. Let me just collect my thoughts, and see if I can just concentrate on how I got through those times, myself."

  I took a slow, warm sip of his excellent coffee, looked up for a moment at his hand-finished sandstone ceiling to collect my thoughts, and launched into the story, taking plenty of time and filling in lots of details, because that's what he wanted, and you always make sure your story pleases the customer if you think he might be in the process of deciding whether or not to kill you. You might call it Scheherazade's Law.

  <> It doesn't fit too well with your standard orphan story, but the truth is that the people that ran the Spokane Dome Municipal Orphanage were reasonably kind, and probably would have been generous had the city government given them with anything to be generous with. I suppose in a sense, looking back, that the city council had been generous, though not intentionally. They had kept the Dolework system running—it had had to be shut down for lack of funds in most places—so that people at least kept eating and had somewhere to stay, and because they needed jobs for every Dolebird, they featherbedded city facilities pretty heavily, which meant the orphanage, like every other city facility, had many more employees than any efficiency engineer would have said that it needed.

  Of course, tak
ing care of kids is a lot more than feeding them, wiping noses, and stopping fights, and a decent orphanage needs to be featherbedded, so that there's a few spare adults around most of the time for the kid who is lonely, or confused, or for some reason just badly needs some undivided attention that nobody wrote down on the schedule.

  The orphanage had quite a few employees who had the makings of good parents, and some first-rate teachers. Since the public-school system had gone private, and money for vouchers was cut down to zero before I was born, we got whatever education could be worked in by the people who were feeding us and watching us; luckily that was considerably more than nothing, even if it was pretty catch-as-catch-can.

  The first year I remember, I was six. The only events outside the orphanage that made an impression on me were the rolling ecological disasters that crashed across the Pacific Northwest. That whole year was a great one for watching the teams of Doleworkers through the big windows in the dome: I saw them on the outside surface struggling frantically to remove a load of snow three times what it had been designed for, cleaning centimeter-thick soot from the huge range and forest fires, battening down the exposed surfaces during seven days of 150-kph winds, and replacing panels pitted by baseball-sized hail. I think at that time I could imagine no profession more romantic or heroic than working on the surface of the dome, and if everyone up there working was just a plain old Dolebird, well, so were all the kind, considerate adults here in the orphanage, who were the nearest thing to parents I would ever have.

  Life crept on, as it will tend to do, and for me the orphanage was about as much world as there was. Most days Mr. Farrell took us out to play games in the park, and we learned all those things that were pritnear extinct among better-off children—baseball and soccer, of course, but also Capture the Flag, Run Sheep Run, and Red Rover. Ms. Kirlian read to us most nights, and in the morning she'd help you with learning to read if you couldn't get along with the AI's on the orphanage werps, which were ten years old and didn't always understand a kid's speech as they should. The food was monotonous but not bad, there were enough affectionate adults to assure you of some hugs when you needed them and somebody who would seek you out and talk to you when life stank, and at least the bunks were warm and the stuff in your foot-locker was yours until you outgrew it and it went to some younger kid. If it wasn't paradise, it was better than a lot of people, over the long centuries, have grown up with.

  The year I turned eleven, I knew real discontent for the first time in my life. That's how I always put it when I tell this story. When I say that that year was 2049, most people immediately conclude that I encountered real discontent because of the way the world was going then. That's why I say it, for the fun of catching them wrong.

  If I had been just a year or two older, and paying any attention to the way the world as a whole was going, I would have been plenty upset about it, like every other reasonably aware person on Earth. For one thing, for the first time in half a century, it was teetering on the brink of war—the slowly dying Pope Pius Benedict hadn't been able to hold things together the way his brilliant, long-lived predecessor, Paul John Paul, had, and Ecucatholicism was starting to fragment in an eerie mirror image of the Reformation as the many churches it had absorbed began to move for greater independence and less tolerance of each other.

  The regional governments in Asia were wobbling under the impact of a new mutation of that old human enemy, tailored rice blast, which had devastated them at the end of the Eurowar. Moreover, a new threat to the domesticated whale herds that were the source of more than half of the Asian protein supply, CPCA, Cetacean Prionic Cephaloatrophy, informally known as "whale scrapie," had roared through domestic whale populations from India to Hawaii in less than a year.

  Based on seismic testing and deep cores, the scientists gave it no more than ten years till the West Antarctic ice sheet slipped, to be followed, probably, by fragmentation and rapid calving in Wilkes Land; the oceans were now rising and falling two full feet with the summer-winter cycle in the Northern Hemisphere, but they were about to start doing it nine feet higher up, and because everything depended on the exact mechanism by which Antarctica would lose its ice, no one knew whether the world's coasts would have twenty years' or twenty hours' warning. It was horribly clear that forty years of global reconstruction were about to go down the toilet; the greatest effort the species had ever made for its common interests, and those of the planet, had turned out to be too little and too late.

  All too predictably, most of the human race, having struggled shoulder to shoulder for two generations to save the planet, now that things were turning to shit, rushed about looking for ways to make matters worse. Several of the constituent Ecucatholic churches were pushing candidates for the next pope, and declaring the others' candidates unacceptable, even before the current pope was dead. A new intolerant version of Islamic fundamentalism was sweeping into the parts of the world that had been converted by cybertao the generation before. Regional governments were asserting rights over resources that in better times they would not have claimed, and making so-far vague threats at each other and at the planetary government. A political battle was forming in many parts of the world about when and where—or whether—to resettle sea-coast populations.

  Meanwhile, by late summer of 2049, the global weather models were forecasting that, after decades of wobbling madly, the world climate was at last going to achieve a stalemate, if not stability, for a few decades: a new ice age in the northern hemisphere, a warm interglacial in the south, and storms beyond anyone's imagining all through the tropics, including, probably, some permanent hurricanes on the scale of the Cyclone of 2021, giant storms that would circle the Earth at the equator for decades. They were seriously trying to figure out if the towers up to the supras—three kilometers thick and 36,000 kilometers tall, all anchored to mountaintops along the equator—could stand up to the near-supersonic cyclones they were expecting.

  So the world had reason for its discontent. But if you think back to when you were a kid, you won't be surprised to hear that none of that mattered a fart in a windstorm to eleven-year-old me. I had reason enough for my own discontent and could have been just as unhappy in the golden days of the 2020s. What mattered to me was that I had only two shirts that were not hand-me-downs, one pair of pants without patches or stains, and since laundry day was once a week, most days I couldn't wear those "good" clothes. This is a problem when you have fallen in love with the most beautiful girl alive, even if her wardrobe is no better than yours.

  Tammy Knight was probably not particularly impressive to any guy who wasn't also eleven: in holos I have from the orphanage, taken in that year, to my adult eyes her major characteristics are a thick mane of frizzy, orangish hair, the color called strawberry-blonde if you didn't go to college or auburn if you did, plus two extremely long knobby-kneed legs that end in remarkably big feet. The rest of her was a skeletal sketch of a person, with rampant freckles, vivid green eyes, and long fine-boned fingers. In fact she turned into a beauty, and I think all of us boys in the orphanage always knew she would, but I have no idea what power let a kid see that. As an adult I'd've never seen it coming.

  She had more immediate charms than impending beauty, from the viewpoint of a boy her own age. Tammy could pitch like a rifle, played forward with an aggression terrifying to behold, and was followed around by a half dozen of the littler kids all the time, mainly because she was always patient with them and would listen when they talked to her, which was constant. I was hopelessly, madly in love with her, in the way you can only be if you are not aware that this can happen again many times in a normal life—but then, perhaps I was accidentally wise about that, because I was not going to have a normal life.

  You can't really say it was unrequited love, since I never said a thing about it. Furthermore, she, along with the entire rest of the universe, appeared to be unaware of anything other than my friendship, and that was mostly confined to three kinds of interaction with her:
when she pitched, I caught; when she played forward, I played goal; and when one of her entourage of little kids would break a toy, she'd smile at me and say "Please" and—if it were humanly possible—I would fix it. Though none of those were the relationship I wanted to have, I could just barely admit to myself that I wanted anything else, and my ideas about what feelings and experiences ought to go into that imaginary relationship were extremely fuzzy. I kept quiet, looked for a chance to talk to her whenever I could, and lived in terror that the other guys would find out and my life would become a hell of endless mockery.

  At least, if religious war came, as everyone was now expecting, there wouldn't be much fighting right where I was, because Spokane Dome was deep in a heavily Ecucatholic area. Many tiny Protestant churches had gone Ecucatholic all at once in the Great Rejoining of 2004, and there just hadn't been enough of the highly educated computer geeks around to form more than a small minority for cybertao.

  Because Spokane was such an Ecucatholic town, the municipal orphanage almost always held a Christmas/Hanukkah pageant, carefully kept bland enough not to offend cybertaoists (who, if not driven out, would celebrate anything with anybody). When necessary it could be easily modified to slip in a nod to Ramadan. And in Spokane, like any place where the population ran heavily to Ecu-catholicism, 2049 was going to be a big, big year for the Christmas pageant.

  Seemingly on the brink of death, during another false alarm, in early September, Pius Benedict had proclaimed that Christmas of 2049 was to be dedicated to celebrating, and praying for the continuation of, the forty-seven years of world peace we had had—and the fact that no one would have suggested waiting for the fiftieth anniversary pretty much told you everything about how little faith anyone had by then that we could make it that far.