Candle

by Barnes, John

  At sunrise, we were way to hell and gone somewhere in South Dakota, they had just stopped shooting at us and broken off the pursuit, and Fargo was naked to the enemy.

  We raced north as fast as we could, and we damn near made it; Burton‘s Thugs for Jesus, or what was left of us, were running even faster than we had after the slamming-around we’d just taken. Most of us had families in Fargo, or at least girlfriends.

  Not long before noon, we were making a final dash, moving along at almost 200 mph over the prairie and meadow country that had been wheatfields once, about forty miles west of Fargo. It might have been a nice day if we hadn’t all been worried sick about getting there, but theoretically in just minutes we could be taking up positions to the east of town, and calling in all the passenger disksters available. We weren’t going to try to stop them, just slow them long enough to make it possible to get the civilian population, especially our dependents, out of their way. Burton had pledged to use the whole unit treasury, if need be, to evacuate all the civilians in Fargo-Morehead Dome.

  Now all we had to do was get there soon enough and hold long enough.

  Burton and his four headquarters staff were in the diskster just over a roll of land from us, maybe a mile and a half away—we were staying spread out in case of attack—and so I didn’t see it directly, but there’s no mistaking an atom bomb. A white flash over the ridgeline blinded us for a moment, and the diskster slewed sideways and bounced along for half a mile or more in just a few seconds, before the AI got it back under control and brought it around. By the time we were back near where we had been, the classic mushroom cloud was already forming. Burton must have been right at ground zero when that went off.

  While we all wondered what to do—none of us had ever had any other CO and anybody else we might have turned to for leadership was on the diskster with him—one of the disksters for my platoon flared with blue arcs as it sank into the tall grass, its balancing capacitors all discharging. Our diskster went in to see if we could help, and the surviving parts of BTJ went with us because they weren’t sure what else to do, but as we arrived, our com crackled and an unfamiliar voice said, “Burton‘s Thugs for Jesus, this is Shultz’s Rangers. We’ve got you. Every one of your disksters has a weapon locked on it, and we are preparing to shut down your propulsion by our control of your software, which we just demonstrated with one diskster. Please have your senior surviving sergeant surrender, so we won’t have to fire again.”

  That was me, I realized. I grabbed the com. “Burton‘s Thugs for Jesus here. We’ll surrender. Are you offering UCEMC terms?”

  “Our employer does not permit that,” the voice said, flatly, and I realized that the other unit was memed with One True, so there wasn’t going to be any negotiating. “Do you still wish to surrender or shall we fire?”

  I gave the order, and our surviving five disksters set down, grounded out their charges, and went inert.

  An hour later, still the senior surviving sergeant, I was trying to explain the issue. “Look,” I said, “we are not acting for Real America in this. It just happens that most of our family and friends live in Fargo. All we’re asking is time to declare it an open city, and some respect for Hague and Geneva. And we’re asking. We’re certainly not in any position to tell you.”

  Shultz nodded agreeably, his eyes far off; probably his whole company had only recently been turned. It was said that One True would do that to you for anything that it considered to be a violation of your contract. He spoke on the com for a while, repeating our requests.

  Then he stopped and said, “Fargo-Morehead has been promised to Murphy’s Comsat Avengers as a reward for their services. We are not at liberty to make any other arrangements. We will hold your forces here for sixty hours and then release you.”

  My heart sank through the floor. Murphy’s Comsat Avengers was one of the most brutal mercenary companies anyone had heard of—from a unit initiation that made me sick to my stomach just to hear about, to an earned reputation as the most enthusiastic serbers in the war, to the mutilated bodies that they left behind to make pursuers hesitate, they were the epitome of everything that the War of the Memes had turned into in the last few years. They were one of the very few not-yet-turned companies that One True had under contract. It was rumored that they hadn’t been turned because One True didn’t want to share in any of their memories. I believed it.

  I tried to appeal to Shultz’s honor as a soldier and his human feelings, and I tried begging, and I offered to sign over our whole unit treasury to ransom the city, or even just to ransom our dependents. But it was absolutely no use to argue; Shultz now thought whatever One True needed him to think, and One True wasn’t going to change its mind for a few scruffy, defeated POWs, not when it had already promised to reward one of its most effective fighting units.

  We sat out our sixty hours under guard, and when they let us go, we fifty-five survivors—all that were left of the 122 men who had started out—began the long, unhappy walk toward Fargo. Nobody in Shultz’s company bothered to say good-bye, let alone good luck.

  <> Four days after I’d seen Burton vanish under that mushroom cloud, I stood by two graves in the public park not far from the college.

  Hardly anyone was alive in that miserable town. Looking for Tammy, I’d seen half a dozen things that I figured I would remember for the rest of my life—a pile of heads outside a hospital, a whole street with a body on every tree, a quartered baby on a park bench, a woman with all four limbs torn off floating face down in a fountain.

  It took me most of the day to find Tammy and Carrie, and it was almost a relief: they’d just been running down the street, trying to get away, and been hit from behind by machine-gun fire, probably body-heat-seeking bullets, because they’d each been hit in the back and the bullet had gone out through their hearts. They had died instantly, without torture or serbing, as far as I could tell, and Murphy had not been able to use them for his legendary hobby of killing children in front of their parents. No, they had been very afraid, and perhaps hurt for just a second, and then they had fallen forward, dead, Carrie’s forearm still clenched in Tammy’s hand.

  I dug the graves deep and was careful about it; when I finished, I rolled a matformer over from a hardware store, set it on vitrous, and started shoveling dirt into it, letting it fill its tank all the way before I dumped it into the graves, so that I wouldn’t have to smell too much of what happened when the hot material hit the bodies.

  When I had filled the graves with molten glass, I poured a big block of glass at the head of each, positioning it to weld onto the filled grave, and with an iron bracket from a shattered park bench I pressed their names and their birth and death dates onto the slowly solidifying glass. I figured if anyone, animal or human, wanted to defile a grave, there would be easier ones to defile.

  For two full years afterwards I was a madman. There really wasn’t any other word for it. I took to stalking Murphy’s Comsat Avengers. Every few weeks I’d pick out a man asleep in his tent, a sentry, a messenger, or any living human target from Murphy’s, as long as I was sure of my escape, and kill him with a knife or bare hands, partly to be less detectable, mostly because it was more messy and painful for the victim.

  Besides, doing it that way sometimes gave me an instant, as they realized what I was about to do, to tell them why. And after they were dead, I would do some cutting and rearranging, to give their buddies a surprise when they found them.

  When MCA went into battle, I would shadow a scout or flanker, and kill him in the uproar. I had a few noisy radio beacons with timers that I would sometimes stick onto a piece of their equipment, and now and then one would go off and a diskster or a heavy weapon would be hit.

  I left no notes, told no one, talked to no one who wasn’t already dying, gave them no clue about who was doing it. I moved from place to place, following them generally east across the Midwest.

  Eventually they were based along the south shore of Lake Ontario, not far from t
he southern tip of the still-growing Hudson Glacier. It was cold and dreary and the cover was less plentiful, but I stuck around and kept killing them, a few per year. I lived on one kind and another of scavenging; I was barely more than a predatory animal.

  Once, when I had gone hungry for a while, and I had knifed two Comsat Avengers in their tent as they slept, I took away not only their rations, but their buttocks, hamstrings, and quadriceps; that might have been the beginning of my return to sanity, because when I reached my camp, the thought of cooking and eating those was too much. I tossed them out into the snow for a cougar, wolf, or coyote. To my surprise, I could not quite descend as far as cannibalism. Still, the next night I shot one of their sentries at long range, so I hadn’t exactly forgiven or forgotten. I just had some standards, I guess you’d say.

  I doubt they even knew I was there. They were up to their necks in so much fighting, and so much of it was now stalk-and-ambush, that a few men more or less in a year was nothing much. If they thought about it, they must have thought that they were running into exceptionally bad luck, the way the rest of the human race had been for so long.

  <> Dave leaned back and shuddered for a moment, more as if he were cold than afraid. “Up around Lake Ontario?” he asked.

  “Yeah, not far from where the St. Lawrence ice dam used to form and break. Spent a long time freezing my butt off up there. Not much left in the ruins—so many armies had gone through, you know. But I managed.”

  He stared into space for a long time. “You and I have much more in common than either of us thought,” he said. “I lived up there at the same time, so I guess you won’t be surprised to hear that I also had one hell of a grudge against Murphy’s Comsat Avengers. I don’t know who could live in that area and not feel that way, you know?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. The strangest thing to me, right now, is that I’ve spent decades during which the memories didn’t hurt, or at least I didn’t know that they hurt—losing my wife and child, the things I saw, the things I did … I spent ages without thinking about it, and now, here I am an old man, with a lot more present things to worry about, like whether or not you’re going to kill me—and I can’t get it out of my head. I can’t make it go away. I’m halfway to crying and halfway to screaming and if you told me that Murphy’s was somewhere in the neighborhood and you wanted to go kill one, I’d beg you on my knees to let me come along and help. It’s like none of that went away at all; more like I just had a complete lapse of memory for twenty-five years.”

  Dave nodded. “Well, you know, that’s not an uncommon reaction in people who have been dememed. I’ve seen people our age crack up, or go into shock, when they’re dememed, from just remembering too much. Anybody who lived through those years has a bunch of experiences he never wants to talk about, and feelings he can’t get rid of, and so forth. I’m no big fan of One True, but I can understand why some people would let it turn them, or even go out and find it and ask it to turn them. My memories are bad enough, and if someone told me I could just forget them forever, at a bad moment on a bad day, I guess I just might wish to be turned.”

  “It’s not that you forget them,” I said, “it’s just that you don’t think about them. Ever. For a real long time.” A thought was beginning to bother me, more and more—memories and thoughts flooding back, different remembered pains striking me from all sides, throwing me off balance. I realized, too, that I was no longer reaching for Resuna to get them fixed, but I wasn’t sure whether that was because I had gotten used to Resuna not fixing them, or because I didn’t want Resuna to do that. I wished I could make the thought come clear in the front of my mind where I could know it for whatever it might be.

  “Being able to not think about it might be good enough,” Dave said, “when the times are bad enough.” We both leaned back into the hot water, stretching and shaking ourselves out. “Two old farts that spent too much of their lives working hard outside sure appreciate a hot bath, don’t they?”

  I arched my back and let myself float upward. “Yeah. You know how farts like to float to the top in a tub.”

  It was a dumb joke, but he stretched his own back and laughed. “You want to switch from coffee to something stronger? I’ve got cases and cases of wine around and I never drink it because I hate to drink alone.”

  “That would be real fine.”

  “And I ain’t gonna kill you tonight, either. I’m way too soft for this job, you know.”

  “We’re none of us what we used to be,” I said. “Jeez, I don’t even need the wine to make me say stupid things.”

  “It’s like parabolic skis,” he said, grinning, shaking the water drops from his beard as he got out. “You don’t have to have them to turn, but they make it so much easier. You don’t need wine to say stupid things…” He shrugged.

  I gave him a thumbs-up. “Bottle for each of us?” he asked, pausing at the door.

  “Pos. Fucking. Def.”

  He laughed gaily and went out. Abstractedly I considered that I could leap out of the tub, break the coffeepot, jump him when he got back, cut his throat with the shard, put on some of his clothes, and walk out and signal to be rescued. Cowboy hunters are not supposed to kill unless we have to, but I seriously doubted that I’d be in any great trouble about this in the present circumstances. Even if I were, all that my new copy of Resuna would do is help me to see that I had acted in a deluded way, that the violence hadn’t been necessary, had been no part of One True’s intentions.

  I froze. I could barely breathe. The thought I had been looking for had come to me.

  I had spent my years as a soldier—except my very earliest—fighting against One True. I had been on the other side for years. Soldiers for One True had killed my wife and child, shot them down in the back as they fled to escape serbing, torture, god knew what atrocities. One True had turned Murphy’s Comsat Avengers loose on that town, and all those scattered, piled, dangling, mashed bodies had been permitted by it. It had even sent Shultz’s Rangers to keep us away so that we wouldn’t interfere.

  One True had broken the understandings among mercenary companies, making the war much more savage. It had abrogated Geneva and the Hague. It had brought back all the nightmares of past wars, turned loose every horror from atom bombs to massacres to looting and serbing. And I had fought against it. In fact … a huge, dark, horrible shape rose in my mind and I was ready to cry.

  Well, I realized, I sure wasn’t going to kill Dave. He was most likely the only other person on the planet who might understand what the matter was. I just wished I had a clue as to what I was going to do.

  “Well, here’s the party,” Dave said, coming in with four bottles of the wine, a corkscrew, and even wineglasses. “I brought along twice as much wine, just in case the first one I open turns out to have gone to vinegar,” he said. “Besides which, it might just happen we need to get extra-stupid before the evening is over.”

  So it was evening, I thought, and wondered for a moment if guessing a time and believing it—say 8:30 P.M.?—might bring back Resuna. I didn’t much care.

  He fiddled with the first bottle, solemnly, and at last extracted the cork, pouring a sizable glass, which he handed to me. “Try it—carefully.”

  I took a sip. I’m no connoisseur, but it wasn’t vinegar and it didn’t taste like barrel, and it went down smooth and warm. “Great,” I said.

  He handed me the bottle. I poured myself a full glass, set the bottle carefully on the floor beside the hot tub, and took another sip. Meanwhile he was opening the other one, and in a minute he was back in the water beside me. “Good health,” he said, raising the glass.

  I clinked mine against his. “Good health,” I agreed. “Well, I never did answer your question; I told you all the story that leads up to how I got turned by One True, but I never did tell you that story itself.”

  “I sure don’t have any meetings to rush off to,” he said, “and it’s been a long time since I heard a new story. You keep talking
and I’ll keep pouring and we’ll have a fine old time.”

  “It’s not a very nice story,” I said.

  “The best thing about stories about bad stuff,” he said, “most especially true ones, is that you can remember it’s all in the past.”

  I wasn’t so sure it was all in the past, but I didn’t say that. I launched in, and figured we’d talk about it after I told it, or not, just as he pleased. The wine was good, the hot tub was grand, and my calendar was as open as his.

  <> I’ve seen vid and flashchannel recordings of the celebrations of the Pope’s Peace in 2002, the one that ended the Eurowar. People dancing in the streets, soldiers from all the sides hugging each other, the famous shot of the mayor of Paris turning a shovelful of earth to celebrate the beginning of Reconstruction. The Earth was poor, worn-out, shot all to hell. The uncontrolled bioweapons were raging across the planet, converting forests to wastelands, farmers’ fields to obscene black goo, fishing grounds to empty water. Lowland soft-soil areas like Florida, the Netherlands, Bangla Desh, were gone. Tailored rice blast was threatening to make rice extinct in Asia, and if it couldn’t be stopped, the expected famine might wipe out half of the human race.

  And yet there was a sense of hope, faith—even a feeling that human beings had been delivered from a far worse fate—and in the pictures, still or moving, you can see the joy, courage, and faith in the faces of the people.

  There are no such pictures from the end of the War of the Memes. Twelve years, four months, and nineteen days of global fighting don’t leave you much energy or joy to celebrate with. What you see are two sets of expressions: the grim determination on the faces of those whom Resuna had turned, who knew that they were going to be working like donkeys for a decade or more just to get the world back to material decency, and the horror of those trying to emigrate offworld before the scheduled forcible turning of all those who had not turned voluntarily. 2.7 million would depart on the last regularly scheduled voyages of the transfer ships; the rest would be anesthetized so that jacks could be installed in their heads, and then would be quietly, painlessly, but inexorably turned to Resuna.