Candle

by John Barnes

  By the time I was trying to talk my way aboard, only the Wandering Jew, which had been the Earth-Titan transfer ship, remained; I had seen each of the other four transfer ships appear as a dim star in the night sky, grow to be ten times brighter than Venus, recede into dimness again, and then sprout a great flare of purples, golds, and greens as their MAM drives kicked in to re-bend the orbit for a new destination—the Flying Dutchman first, back in March, then Mohammed's Coffin, then Diogenes, and the Albatross just a few weeks ago. Now, in November, with binoculars you could just make out the incoming Wandering Jew. In a few weeks it would go from dim star to bright star to dim star to surreal comet—and it was the last ship from Earth.

  I never got any farther than the cablehead on Mount Cotopaxi. A wheezing spacer in a powered wheelchair heard my story, then asked politely and gently if I had any skills or experience, anything at all, that I hadn't already told him about. I had to admit that since I'd been soldiering from the age of fourteen, I had no skills they were ever likely to need out there. He looked terribly sad as he stamped my form with REFUSED.

  They didn't even have enough seats on the trains, anymore, to let people go up to the supras and try; four million people waited in line on SNY alone, in addition to the two million who normally lived there, all of them endlessly applying, applying, and applying for the few remaining seats, some hoping that their skills would suddenly be wanted after all, others hoping that an administrative mistake might slip them aboard, most just hoping. Trains took two days to geosynchronous orbit, and didn't carry enough passengers; they had to be reserved for people who were genuinely good candidates.

  I walked out of the vast, echoing terminal at the cablehead, and watched for a moment as a train climbed slowly up the narrow line of the track on the vast, kilometer-wide surface of the cable, accelerating quickly to 500 mph, vanishing into the clouds in a few scant seconds. There might be fifty people, out of the thousand on that train, who would get aboard; the rest would be coming back down, after a while, to be turned by Resuna and rebuilt—no doubt into useful, productive, helpful citizens, I thought, savoring the cold cynical feel in my mind, just like I'm gonna be. If Mr. Farrell hadn't been killed in one of One True's bombing raids, I just bet he'd be real pleased with what One True is going to make out of me.

  I had no idea what to do at all; no family left to love, no Murphy's Comsat Avengers left to hate, no BTJ or Real America to command my loyalty anymore. I might have known a person or two in Spokane Dome, but I hadn't been back there in years and hadn't kept in touch with anyone I knew from the orphanage. I guess that was about as alone as I'd ever been.

  I walked down the road, toward the city of Quito. I wasn't planning to walk the whole way, but for the moment I was being too cheap and not in enough of a hurry to catch a public diskster, too tired to think much, not quite too numb to feel sorry for myself, miserably hot in the late afternoon equatorial sun. All along the road I could see exhausted, discouraged, frustrated people like me, in ones and twos and families, some muttering about the unfairness of it all, some trying to cheer themselves up by brightly saying that maybe everyone wouldn't have to be turned (and inventing reasons why One True wouldn't want to turn them in particular), some comforting others, a few cursing endlessly, most just walking along toward Quito because that was the only logical place to walk from the cablehead.

  Beside me, a woman's voice said, "It's really rough, isn't it? People understand that everyone can't go, but all the same it's so hard to be one of the ones who doesn't go."

  "Yeah," I said, as much reply as I could think of. At least this might be someone to talk to. I glanced sideways and saw a woman with a thick, single brown braid down to her waist and an aquiline nose. She was wearing a black and red sweatshirt that advertised the 2048 Olympics in Singapore, mended but not dirty blue jeans, and ankle-high hiking boots. I guessed that she might be anywhere between eighteen and thirty, depending on how she'd gotten through the war. Her head was up and she was looking around, not seeming depressed at all, and that made her absolutely unique on the road, as far as I could see ahead or behind.

  "Do you have any plans for what you're going to do now?" she asked.

  "No," I said. So far she was doing all the work in the conversation, and that seemed sort of unmannerly, so I added, "Didn't have any plans other than to come here and try, so that I could at least feel like I tried. I'm an old mercenary. No use for us on Earth or in the colonies. People have given up war, at least for quite a while, and that's all I ever had any knowledge of or training for."

  "It must be tough to feel like no one needs you anywhere," she said, with just enough real sympathy in her voice so that I was pretty sure she hadn't been walking up the road saying it to everyone, as someone who had been turned by a meme might do. My first thought had been that she must be one of those few people who were still independent of memes—or at least of big, controlling, take-over-the-whole-personality memes—because she didn't have the slightly flat, time-delayed, vaguely robotic affect that most people with memes had, or at least most people that I knew to have memes. It was always possible that she either had one that was cunning enough to lay low, or perhaps she was running a bunch of smaller, non-dominating ones, like so many mercenaries I had known (it could be handy to have some of the abilities they carried, like certain kinds of emotional control and skills). I was lonely but I didn't need company that was going to try to take over my personality—just at the moment that was about all I had left and there wasn't much of it.

  We had walked a short ways together before she said, "I just noticed that you were discouraged, but not angry."

  "I don't have much energy to be angry with," I said. "I lost my family in the war, and I got my revenge for that, and now there isn't going to be a 'me' anymore, so I guess on the whole I'm quits with the world. Whatever I was here for has been accomplished. So I don't have much commitment, one way or another, to anything except going back down to Quito, catching a diskster to somewhere else, and maybe checking into a hotel and spending all my back pay before they erase all money next year."

  What I had just told her wasn't quite true. I had been thinking that a man who had survived out in the wilderness, hunting professional soldiers, as I had for two years, surely could manage to disappear and stay disappeared, maybe living somewhere out on the fringe of the settled areas or maybe around some ruin deep in the woods. It might be lonely, at least until I found other people doing it, which I figured there were bound to be. At least I'd still be myself.

  I was sort of thinking of taking a diskster up to Albany Dome and walking from there up into the Adirondacks—it might take weeks or months, especially with the first heavy snowfalls starting in late September as they did these days, but if I got there soon, grabbed gear and basic supplies in a week or less, and got out of the dome without leaving too many traces, I ought to be thoroughly gone by November 30, when all of us who were still unturned were supposed to turn ourselves in.

  Given just how risky the whole business would probably be, I wasn't about to confide it to a woman I'd just met. You never knew who might be listening or when she might be turned. But I did like the company, and what I had said so far was only what you might have expected of someone who'd been turned down at a cablehead.

  "You're not going to try at Kilimanjaro or Singapore?" she asked, sounding surprised. "You know there's always another chance."

  "Naw. Why? There's another chance if you're on the borderline, maybe, but the list of what they're looking for is the same in all three places, and nobody like me is on that list anywhere, you know? Experienced professional killer? That's just about the only thing that One True and the colonies agree on—they don't want any more of them. So there's no point using up one of my few remaining weeks as myself running from cablehead to cablehead begging. I can make far better use of the time, even if I just use it to lie on my back in the grass, at night, and watch the stars turn around."

  "When you put it that way,
yeah, I guess there are better uses for the time." She grinned at me. "Are you planning to have any company in the grass?"

  "Haven't really been interested since I buried my wife," I said, not particularly sharply. I wasn't trying to discourage her attention—right now it was the only thing even vaguely interesting I had encountered—but I didn't quite have the energy or interest to come up with an appropriate, gracious lie.

  "I did say company, not ass," she pointed out, smiling.

  On the equator, the sun rises right at six and goes down right at six, and so darkness was starting to sweep into the afternoon even though it wasn't particularly late. There was still some daylight left, but the very first lights were going on in Quito, down below us, and the shadows on the backs of the people ahead of us, and the faces of the ones behind us, made everyone into indistinct figures. Now and then a diskster would come up or down the road, alternately darkening or flashing as it passed through patches of light and shadow. We walked another hundred meters or so before she said, "My name is Mary Roder."

  "I'm Currie Curran." I realized the conversation had reached a point where, out of nothing but politeness, I should be asking her a few things about herself. "Were you up there applying, too?"

  "No, not really," she said. "I've got no reason to leave Earth."

  "Not to get away from One True?"

  "I'm part of it," she said, so comfortably and easily that at first I didn't believe she'd said that, and I must have gaped at her stupidly. "Really," she said, emphatically. "I've been running Resuna for a year and a half."

  She kept right on walking along that mountain road, just as casually as if she had merely happened to mention that she collected stamps or had worked as a carpenter. It seemed too bizarre to be a joke and too pointless to be any kind of a scam; it might be the truth.

  "You don't act like somebody with a meme."

  "It doesn't feel like having a meme," she said. "I ran One True for years, and that whole time I felt like I was just crouched in a corner in the back of my brain, unable to do anything but watch. Now I feel like I run the show—I just have a very useful, friendly voice in my head that gets me through things. And on very rare occasions, One True calls me up, but now it calls to talk, it doesn't take over my head."

  "Well," I said, stupidly, repeating the obvious because I couldn't think of anything else to say, "you really don't come across as a person with a meme."

  "Neither do most of the people with Resuna," she said. "I can't promise you, when you turn, that you'll like it, but I can promise it will be different from what most people imagine. I'd think that would be sort of a relief, because most people imagine horrible things."

  I agreed that that was true, and we walked for a while longer. Eventually, looking for something to talk about, we talked about how big the geosynch cable really was, up close—on most of the Earth, of course, the night view of a geosynch cable was just a black vertical line ascending from the horizon, suddenly turning to brilliant silver somewhere in the sky; the silver line continued on up to where it was capped by a burning white dot, the size of a BB shot held at arm's length. But here, right by it, it looked like a mountain with no top; it was almost a mile thick and went right up into the sky farther than you could see, to something that looked like a tiny half moon right overhead.

  I didn't feel much for her, or anything, but Mary was company, and that was pleasant. She didn't seem to be doing any of the things that a person with a meme was usually compelled to do, like trying to persuade me to join her or acquire the meme, which meant either that Resuna was subtle and crafty, or just possibly it really wasn't as terrible as the other memes were.

  Always assuming she was telling the truth at all.

  "I bet," she said, "that you are wondering about whether my copy of Resuna is going to try to grab control of you. Am I right?"

  "Exactly right," I admitted.

  "Well, you aren't going to believe this," Mary said, moving just enough closer to me so I couldn't help being aware of her compact, slightly heavy body. "But it's true, anyway. Resuna is a sterile meme, by design. It has to be loaded into people. It can't load itself or spread by itself. Like a seedless orange or a mule—purely a useful creation, not an independent form of its own."

  "Why?" I asked, really curious about something for the first time in a long time.

  "Because reproductive neurocode for a meme, not to mention the neurocode for reproductive motivation, takes up enormous amounts of space in human memory," she said, "and Resuna no longer needs to be able to reproduce itself, because it isn't going to have to spread by memetic contagion anymore. The global system and One True can reproduce Resuna as needed. The whole idea of Resuna is that it's no bigger than necessary—it leaves you as much room in your head as it can."

  "Why doesn't it just leave you the whole thing?"

  She shrugged. "What kind of world have people made, running their own lives?"

  I thought about that as it got dark and we traveled on. I was more troubled than I wanted to admit by my inability to come up with any answer that was as good an argument as the ones she had right to hand: half the domes on Earth wrecked, hundreds of millions dead, so much of the progress made by the two Reconstruction generations completely undone, the colonies and all the off-Earth industrial production lost, species extinct by the thousands, the glaciers eating away at one hemisphere while warming destroyed the other, the human population itself riddled with near-helpless lunatics who had been so traumatized that they could no longer even take care of themselves—the list went on for a very long time, and against that, all I could say was, "But I'm used to being me."

  "And I'm used to being me," Mary said, "and I still am me. Just me with more self-control, and the ability to work with my whole heart for the common survival—and because everyone else will have Resuna, I also know I'm going to be working with other people who are also giving one hundred percent to it. Do you realize how much difference that makes? No worries, at all, about other people cheating on the social contract—so when you do the right thing, you'll never feel like a sucker. No doubts about how other people are feeling. You get to be your best self, and you can depend on them to be their best selves."

  "Uh, you're not sounding like a meme, but you are sounding like a PR department somewhere wrote your dialogue."

  She giggled, and it was a healthy natural sound. "Yeah, sorry. Resuna spends a certain amount of its effort in persuading the people who have it that they're better off with it. I'm afraid we all do speak with some of the same phrases, and some of them aren't very natural. But Resuna will get smarter. And I'm really not kidding; having it in your head doesn't mean you're not you, which does make it different from most other memes."

  I thought about that one as it got darker. We talked about other trivial stuff, where our lives had taken us, what we had done. I said just enough about having lost Tammy and Carrie so that I figured she wouldn't bring it up; she told me that she'd been a novice in an Unreconstructed Catholic convent. When One True had invaded and captured her area, the convent was given as a reward to a mercenary company, for seventy-two hours of the sort of thing that used to happen in those last years of the war. At the end of the three days, the survivors were all turned by One True. She had One True for a long time after that, "which was probably better than crying and screaming and lying in the fetal position, because I'm here and I'm functioning now. And One True did do some repairs to me, and now Resuna's coming along with fixing up the rest of me, I guess you could say. At least it seems like it's done enough repairs to be able to give me more freedom."

  "More freedom?" I asked. I wasn't used to thinking of that in connection with One True.

  The sun was gone. Our road was lighted in front of us by the glow of the city below. She moved closer, and I felt her hand very tentatively touching mine. A minute later we were holding hands, and that seemed pleasant, after years alone. If this was how One True was going to come after the unturned population, in these
new days of Resuna, well, it was much nicer than being netted, sedated, and brainwashed.

  I thought she had just droplined me, after I asked my question, maybe because she was offended. But then she said, "Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by freedom. Without One True I'd have been free to do whatever I wanted, but all I wanted to do was sit and cry. With One True, I at least got some of my life restarted, and was useful, and meanwhile I could be huddled up inside, crying at first, and then thrashing things out, and finally getting better, while not being either a danger to myself or a burden on everyone else. And now with Resuna I'm free to do and be so many more things, but I feel safer knowing that if I'm about to do something stupid, or crazy, or dangerous, it will stop me—probably just by talking to me and persuading me that it's not in my best interests. So I'm free to not be miserable, or useless, and I'm free to not spend all of my time coping with what happened to me and my friends, and most of all I'm free to make myself useful and effective and someone I can like. That's Um more freedom than I had when I felt compelled to rock and sob."

  "I can see how you would feel that way," I said, and couldn't help thinking that if Tammy and Carrie had survived, somehow, they too would have been living down gruesome memories for a long time, and might well have welcomed anything at all that gave them a way to function and to shut down some of the pain.

  "Well," she said, "and it's done other good things for me. Can I be honest with you?"

  "I think I'd prefer it," I said, "if Resuna will let you."

  "Silly, it's the one that suggested being honest." She drew a deep breath and pressed down on my hand, so that we walked even closer to each other. "The thing is, it's hard to explain," she said, "and I'm afraid it might upset you, but I'd rather have you know it than not. I was a virgin—hadn't even been kissed—when I entered the convent. Then I got gang-raped for several hours, and some other stuff." She said it with about as much emotion as most people mention having their wisdom teeth out. "After I got turned to One True, I never had sex, and I haven't had sex since I turned from One True to Resuna, but Resuna says I'm ready if I want to, and, well, gee, I'm healthy and twenty-two and ... uh, see, Resuna and One True have really good information about me, and good information about many people they haven't turned yet, and ... oh, well, look, One True picked you out for me. Since I was already here in Quito, it's where my job is and all, and they knew you were applying, they sent me up here to meet you. And I think you're really great-looking and you've been so nice and well—there. Now I told you. But I approached you all on my own. Really. I just got some hints about what to say from Resuna. So if we, you know, do it, you'll be with me, not with Resuna, and we don't have to rush or anything if you—"