Candle

by Barnes, John

  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.

  Besides, he’d have to be nearly on top of me to see it today. In the shade, and in the thin cold air, the clouds rose less than two meters before they turned to ice crystals and tumbled away invisibly on the wind. I was careful to make sure that the cloud of vapor didn’t drift into the sunlight before it froze. He’d have to be looking right at this part of the mountain to catch me.

  I gulped some warm water, swallowed a few bites of the blueberry-flavored field rations, and systematically studied the fresh slope above me. Knowing his way of moving, I could pick out his path pretty quickly, and soon I was herringboning along his pathway, now warm without being hot, and refreshed by the food and water. I went at it hard, making good time.

  Checking the satellite map, I saw that I was still angling toward my base camp; I might have only a couple hundred meters to go to get home, if the pattern held. There would be two more ridgelines before I reached the top, but I doubted that he was going all the way to the top—not with a decent pass just two kilometers west. Probably the tracks would start to angle west either over this next ridgeline, or the one after it.

  I worked steadily up the hill, following the footprints closely, not cutting across his track, because you never know what additional clues might be around any one track. However, because Lobo had not been in much of a hurry, he hadn’t dropped anything or torn anything off his clothes, or broken any branches. Unlike so many pursuits I’d been on, he wasn’t bleeding, either.

  I pushed my way over the next ridgeline without stopping, exulting in the chill taste of the thin air and the thunder of blood in my ears, but when I got to where I could see what came next, I was somewhere between muttering and swearing. It hadn’t been especially visible from the satellites, being long and thin and rimmed with trees, but I was looking right at an old rockslide, and that was just where the few tracks I could see led.

  If you’re evading capture, old slides are your best friends in the mountains. There’s all the bare rock you could ever want to put your hands and feet on, and furthermore, unless the guy tracking you knows the rockslide as well as you do, it’s dangerous. A rockslide is only a temporarily stopped river of scree, and it can start flowing again with almost any provocation. Once you’ve worked out a safe path through one, by slow and cautious exploration, anyone coming along after you is going to have a hell of a time figuring out where you’ve gone, and will have to go very, very slowly if he wants to follow you up the slide without running the risk of getting killed.

  So I stared at that dead end, trying to think of what to do next. It was less than an hour till sunset, and good as the light amplifiers were nowadays, they still couldn’t find faint tracks in dirt under a tree after dark. I would have to give this up soon no matter what I decided.

  It was looking like an excellent time to just turn and head for home, unless I saw his tracks leading off the rockslide somewhere. After a thorough search with binoculars, I didn’t. I checked with the satellite and it was just as I had feared; the rockslide bent in an L shape farther up, and ran for almost a kilometer along the face of this big ridge; in at least fifty places, trees and brush got near enough to it to provide an invisible escape off the scree and into the woods. My best hope would be to search each of those potential escapes, one by one, probably the west side first. It would take most of the day tomorrow.

  I was well and truly screwed: I had no tricks left to find him with. Probably he would find me first. Maybe he wouldn’t come that way for another day or so, but that wasn’t much to hang my hope on. Badly discouraged, I turned for home.

  There was a deep draw on my direct path home to camp, too, and skirting around that through the woods meant that I didn’t reach camp till the full moon was up again. At least it was so late that my post-sunset watch over the valley had only half an hour to go. I sat down in the snow, sipped warm water from the suit, chewed a chocolate ration bar, swept the valley in all wavelengths over and over, and—despite Resuna’s prodding—felt extremely (lorry for myself. Exactly on the minute, I gave up the watch, just as fruitless as the pursuit had been, and went inside.

  I staggered into the shelter, tired and cold, with the ominous feeling I was getting old. Resuna crept quietly into the less-conscious part of my awareness, like a friendly old cat sneaking onto your lap, and I let it hang around there to see what it could do.

  The hot soup and noodles that I reconstituted were one of the best meals I ever had, the bed felt remarkably good, and just as I stretched out, my copy of Resuna passed along, via One True, a warm, deep feeling of affection from Mary; she missed me but she was happy and comfortable at home. The warmth, dark, and silence got me to sleep right away.

  <> I suppose that in my youth, I might have been a hero to little kids. After all, I was a cop, and there had always been great numbers of shows about cops in the days before memes.

  Resuna and I have argued about this many times. I say that people were attracted to cops because so many of them were good-looking guys—young, alert, in great shape. Besides, uniforms and guns always got attention.

  Resuna says what all the attraction to the cops was about was that most of humanity was looking forward to the creation of the memes and eventually of the One True meme. Resuna has a tendency to see One True wherever it looks, which I guess isn’t very different from what human beings used to do when they saw gods everywhere.

  What Resuna says is that the police were always the agents of order. Society runs on order. Hence the police always sent the message, whenever they appeared, on the street or in entertainment, that order was good, order should be sought, and that human beings who helped to make order were better than human beings who helped to destroy it.

  Resuna never has convinced me, but we argued for years. It was a good way to while away otherwise dull time on stakeouts; it didn’t interfere with seeing or hearing and it made no noise. I know Moonchild Swann used to play chess with her copy of Resuna, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that during stakeout, everybody was locked in some kind of conversation with Resuna. All that it was, was that the conversations I preferred were vaguely philosophic arguments, was all.

  Every so often, to vary the argument, and because Resuna is always helping everyone examine their feelings and helping them to stay a valid and fully compatible unit within One True, Resuna would work through the issue with me, not as a philosophic matter, but as an emotional one: did I wish that I had lived in a previous era when an individual such as I might have been a hero? Did I dream about such times, or feel disappointed that I hadn’t been part of them? Or if I didn’t wish that I could have been a hero, did I sometimes regret, perhaps, that I had not lived in the intermediate generations when heroes gave way to role models?

  Heroes were people who were idolized and admired for being bigger and better than you thought anybody could be—dreams of what a human being might struggle forever to just barely live up to. They were visions of what was beyond the human, structured in a way that called forth the human maximum.

  Role models were friendlier, squishier concepts, for the friendly, squishy times in which they formed. They were people that you could imagine being; people you knew, who you were sure—given some effort—you could be like. It was the essence of a hero to be at or beyond the human boundary; it was the essence of a role model to be well within it, to be something that a human being could reasonably aspire to be.

  And finally, at our point in history, there were no heroes anymore, and there were no role models, but there was what I was—for which there didn’t need to be a word, because, though we cowb
oy hunters and other people who did dangerous, individual jobs, were useful, we were no longer important. One True could draw pieces from any of the vast number of its component Resunas and individual psyches, all over the Earth. If any child, or anyone at all, needed my approach to the world, emotional attitude, moral qualities, or any other bit or piece of my way of doing things, at any time in life, she or he could have it instantly, not by laboriously copying external actions until they became habits and then parts of nature, but by an easy direct transfer—One True would call my copy of Resuna, which would copy the required piece of my personality and upload it to One True, which would then download it via the child’s copy of Resuna.

  Resuna says it was really just a matter of the human race developing a more efficient process for moving information from one brain to another; the structures we called heroes were the oldest, crudest, and least-efficient system for copying virtues. If unusual courage and cunning existed in Odysseus, and the rest of his culture wanted to share them, his courage and cunning had to be told and retold at aural speeds, from mouth to ear, over and over again, until they were sharpened into a particularly clear and memorable form, and then the text had to be repeated to people until the merest mention of Odysseus would fill the mind with the drive to be clever and the self-perception of courage, for anyone who heard it.

  Role models, as a way of transmitting virtues, were less thrilling and perhaps traded away some high resolution and clarity in order to be able to reach more people, more thoroughly and faster. The role-model method of transmitting virtues was to train a child to see her or his own abilities and potentials in the people around him. That didn’t produce the excellence that the heroes had, since no one ever reached beyond what had already been achieved; at best it produced a competence that only degraded slowly from generation to generation. But it did provide very effective socialization. You didn’t get any more high soarers, but nearly everyone took off and flew for a ways.

  In this century, direct transfer of information, brain to brain, via Resuna and One True, provided greater accuracy and clarity than the “hero” protocol, and greater efficiency and wider accessibility than the “role-model” protocol—I could almost think I heard Resuna preening about the subject. The personal traits of people like me and the other specialists working for One True—not just the hunters but the engineers, rangers, ecologists, scouts, and all the other dedicated units that put high skill and personal courage and integrity at the service of the planet—were available to every person on Earth, whenever they needed to be like us. Ordinary people no longer had to form those qualities by long habit of practice; they were directly available just as soon as you needed them.

  It was as if every Greek had been able to be possessed by the spirit of Odysseus at will, as if every athlete had an inspirational coach at his elbow and every preacher heard the voice of his god directly, and perhaps most important, in the long run, it was as if every parent could be the best parent on Earth. And so the reified, studied, carefully rehearsed and ingrained examples—the heroes and role models—passed from human memory, except as characters in old stories, for whom fewer and fewer people had any time or interest. One True had largely stopped bothering even with revising those old stories, since they no longer received the attention that might allow them to do harm, and any benefit they might exert could be achieved by more effective means.

  Those were the thoughts I drifted awake with, shading into Resuna’s usual celebration of morning—how good it is to contribute, how important it is to be a part of something bigger than yourself, how much one must rejoice in the strength of One True, and in the sanity that Resuna brings to your life. Resuna usually ran something like that through my head in the morning; my copy of Resuna and I shared the joke that it was a sort of mouthwash against spiritual morning breath, for often, when I was waking from sleep, my old memories crapped up my view of the “world.

  When I had served in Burton‘s Thugs for Jesus, we had been a relatively respectable outfit, but we had also been mercenary soldiers. There had been things I had seen my comrades do, and things I myself had done, that still, late at night, sometimes could disturb my sleep despite everything Resuna could do, and despite all the comfort of waking to find Mary beside me. Now, drifting awake, comfortably naked on the warm bed, with a day of challenging, productive work ahead of me—work that I knew it was terribly important to do—I drank in the sense of my place in One True, and thus in the perfection of human history, like a magic restorative honey in some old fantasy—sweeter than anything else could possibly taste, and bringing me strength, welling inexhaustibly from within me.

  When I went outside in the pre-dawn, it had snowed, and exactly the wrong amount—not enough to obscure the fresh tracks I had made the day before, but very likely enough to cover Lobo’s older, already partially melted trail.

  It was also extremely cold, as it so often is in the mountains in the hours just after a snowfall. No stars shone, and the moon was an occasional yellowish smear in the west that never quite broke through the clouds; probably a high nimbus hanging over the area, enough to keep the “warming sun out, not enough to hold ground heat in. It was going to be a real stinker of a morning.

  You do your job even on bad days, so I turned up the temperature in my suit to warm the stiffness out of my joints, and sat up on the ridge for the dawn watch, scanning mostly in infrared because there was so little light in the visible band. I focused on the area where I knew his trail ran, but I saw nothing of Lobo. That could be because he had not come that way yet, or it could just as easily be because during the night he had seen my clumsy tracks from the day before, knew what was up, and was now four drainages away and running like a scared cat.

  In infrared, the sun shone through the clouds as a great bright sprawling spider. The morning was so cold, and the light that filtered through the high clouds so feeble, that even after the sun had been up for half an hour, there was too little contrast to really see properly in the infrared: everything was about the same (painfully low) temperature.

  It was still pritnear dark as night in the visible spectrum, but I flipped back to it, cranking up amplification to the maximum, to break the monotony. No Lobo, nothing moving, no sign that I wasn’t the only thing alive that morning.

  When the sun had been up for an hour, I went back into the shelter, had a quick breakfast, and suited up again. It looked like I would just have to stay on plan, since nothing better had appeared so far.

  I shaped my flexis into telemark skis, let them cool, and pushed off; now that I knew where I was going, I could go much more efficiently. Fighting my way around that deep draw the night before had convinced me that I’d be better off going down and then up; besides, since that old road cut right across one of his major pathways, probably it would cut across more than one. I skied to the nearest convenient high point on the road, and started my search from there, slowly drifting down the road between the gray trees and the gray rocks, under a blurry gray sky, as the temperature continued to fall and little bits of sleet occasionally spit out of the sky and skittered down the hood of my suit. Without the satellite guidance, I’d have felt hopelessly lost in no time at all; as it was, I had to check my position every few minutes.

  I was down at the place where I had found his trail, the day before, in only about an hour, and although it was now beginning to snow in earnest, at least that made a more pleasant surface for skiing, might help in hiding my tracks, and was sort of pretty in the gray, silent forest.

  The tracks down here, on the lower part of the slope, were covered by the drifting snow, but I followed the satellite’s guidance up the hill to where Lobo’s track had petered out, going up onto that old rockslide. I planned to cast back and forth along the west side, up to the top of the ridge, and then work my way back down the east, looking for the place where Lobo got on or off the rockslide—or perhaps even to see a print or two in the fresh snow on the scree, if by any chance he had come this way the night bef
ore.

  I stamped up the gentle slopes and herringboned up the steep ones, making good time but only by dint of buckets of sweat. By the time I got up to the slide itself, it was almost mid-morning, and I stopped to open a ration pocket, take out a warm cheese sandwich and a pouch of tomato soup, and swallow those, chasing them down with a pouch of hot coffee.

  This time, knowing that it could be a long day and I might not be getting home till well past dark, I had loaded all seven ration pockets on the suit with reconstituted stuff that could stay warm all day. Besides, it gave me more heat sinks for my body heat without having to vent and make myself visible in the infrared.

  I made sure the next pocket from which I intended to eat was set to warm, and that the other pockets were to stay at ambient unless they were needed as auxiliary heat sinks, and got back on my way, herringboning up the west side of the scree, gliding about in each successive little tongue of forest or brush that presented itself, until I was sure I’d have picked up any track. There was no trace.

  Today, besides coping with the cold, the clouds, and the bad luck and fruitlessness, I was going to have three long gaps in satellite coverage, all in the afternoon. Normally the periods when a satellite can’t pick up the signal from the jack in your forehead, even out in a less-covered area like this, were only about four or five minutes long at worst. If you were line of sight from SNY, or from the towers of the several new supras now under construction, antennas on any of them could give you continuous coverage.