by Barnes, John
Two thick ruler-straight tracks ran across the meadow through the deep fresh powder from the place where I had fallen to where I stood. I had come in a straight line, instead of circling around among the trees. No wonder I’d gotten here so quickly.
That big straight track might as well be a gigantic arrow pointing straight at where I stood. Worse still, it was pointing at a sizable part of the vital stocks we would need to live through the next year.
I stared at that for a long moment, wondering first what had possessed me to do something so astonishingly bokked up. Then I wondered why I couldn’t remember it. Then my blood froze, and I remembered falling down, losing my temper—and invoking Resuna. Which had, as far as I could tell, popped up, taken care of the task for me, and put me on my way home, but which also had a strong interest in seeing me get caught.
If the jack in my head was still operating, One True now knew everything. I couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t just kept control once it got Resuna back into my head, but for some reason it hadn’t. Why had it turned me loose again?
The silence, the clarity of the colors and outlines, the chill of the air in my nostrils, were all sinister to me now. I had betrayed a good friend in a moment of sheer involuntary idiocy, I had put myself back in reach of Resuna and thus under the control of One True, and I would be giving up the whole dream of living up here and letting the world just slide by—back into the dull world of forced retirement, of Resuna holding Mary and me together, of drifting from one predictable, unimportant activity to another.
I felt like crying; I felt like taking my knife and just opening a vein right there. It would be so good to just cease to be. It was very likely that there was no longer anything I could do for Dave; I was miles away with no way to communicate with him. Chances were that fifty hunters were zooming in toward him in disksters, and he’d be captured any minute and turned within a day. Probably I’d even see him again—after he was turned, we could pal around together and our copies of Resuna could have a nice chat. Probably One True would find him a nice wife, or even put him back together with Nancy and Kelly. Probably when I did see him, he’d thank me. Probably he’d be having to say “Let overwrite, let override” every ten minutes for the next few years; probably his life would seem as if he were suffering seizures every few minutes.
I was disgusted to realize that once Resuna had me again, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I’d be able to look the man right in the eye and think I’d done him a favor.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to live to see that, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to just kill myself now, either. Mostly I just wanted to not feel what I was feeling. I have to admit that the real reason for doing what I did next was not shame, nor acceptance. It was pure absolute dead solid cowardice. I just didn’t want to face that situation any further, and since I couldn’t get out of the situation, I tried instead to get out of facing it.
I looked around that meadow, up the saddle, toward Columbia Peak, and saw it for what I figured would have to be the very last time with eyes that were completely my own. Tears stung my eyes, and I said, “Let overwrite, let override.”
Nothing happened.
I said it again, and once again, nothing happened. There wasn’t a trace of Resuna.
I said it again, several times. I started to lose my temper and shouted it several times, but no Resuna came—only distant, distorted echoes from cliff walls.
I was all by myself, no idea where to go or what to do.
<> I think I stood there for quite a while, because the blue-edged deep shadows were longer by the time that I finally sighed, wiped my eyes, and decided that absolutely nobody would be benefited if I just stood here and froze to death.
I had three choices. I could try to get away on my own—in the winter, with no supplies since Resuna would know where all the caches were and I wouldn’t dare go there.
I could ski downhill till I found a road, and follow the road downhill till I found an emergency station, and then call up the system and turn myself in. Somebody would come out pretty quickly in a diskster, take me home, and get a new copy of Resuna installed.
Or I could gamble. I could proceed as if I knew that I had only been running part of Resuna, with its communications section not working. It was even possible, I supposed, that the blows to my head had smashed my cellular jack—it was possible, since it was only an inch or so from where the biggest scar was—or that it had all happened during a gap in satellite coverage, or any number of other things had prevented the betrayal.
That last option was the only one that had any chance of working out and didn’t make me feel like a skunk.
If I was right, and One True had not been contacted, or not contacted reliably, then all we had lost was one cache. In that case, if Dave and I moved fast, we could go to our drop-everything crisis plan—hurry over to the new place, camp there, move in a couple of caches, start digging, live rough for a while until we had a chance to scavenge enough supplies to start building it up.
It was just possible that all was not lost—if we moved fast enough.
I pushed off hard and took the fastest concealed route I knew to make it home, skating the whole way, throwing myself upslope, rocketing downslope just barely in control, half-blind with sweat and tears and terror, not caring about the way my muscles screamed at it. I was over that high saddle in no time, down into the Dead Mule drainage, and racing for home like a madman—still skiing as carefully as I could, because I knew I was frustrated and angry, and I thought that if I face-planted again, or kissed a tree, or just took a bad fall, the rage and fear and frustration might overwhelm me. I might automatically say “Let overwrite, let override,” and be back with Resuna again.
I hit a long run down a ridgeline into a bowl, and put on even more speed; any faster and my stopping distance would be greater than my seeing distance. It was likely I was already too late, but it would be certain if one more thing went wrong.
<> The sun was still up, but close to the ridge, when I finally glided up to the rock shelf, popped the skis off, and ran inside. Dave wasn’t home. Probably he was off hunting elk—we’d been needing fresh meat to replenish the larder. He might well be out till after dark, which might could work out better.
We’d figured out a procedure for just such occasions, so I got going on it. Each of us had a “jump bag” ready to go, packed with personal essentials for surviving a night in the woods if we had to, plus a little package of sentimental stuff and some dry rations. The two jump bags sat side by side on the floor near the entrance; if one of us discovered that it was time to run, and the other one was out, then if we were to meet up at the new hot spring, the signal would be both jump bags being gone.
If just your partner’s jump bag was gone, that would signal that neither this cave nor the new one was safe, and that we were to meet up whenever we could at a specific ruined house two drainages away; whoever got there first, unpursued, would wait a week for the other.
We had agreed that the one-bag-gone signal would only count if a specific red blanket had been left on top of the laundry hamper. That way your partner doing routine repacking or rearranging wouldn’t send you running off into the woods for two weeks.
We had never assigned any meaning to the situation that I discovered: my jump bag was there, Dave’s jump bag wasn’t, Dave wasn’t there either—and no blanket on the hamper. I needed to leave him a signal to run for the new hot spring, which I thought made the most sense in the circumstances. I was figuring that if One True had gotten everything from my memory, we were too screwed to recover from it and would be captured whether we stayed here, went there, or went to the ruined house. On the other hand, if One True hadn’t gotten enough information to find us, the new spring was the best place to hide—it already had the necessities for us to stay in it for a few weeks and let our trail get cold, it was comfortable and safe, and it had lim less trace of Dave or me around it than this place did.
I had no signal from Dave, and I had
no way of leaving him the message that I wanted to leave—writing a note of any kind would risk its being read by the hunters, if they found the cave before Dave got home. The question was, how long should I stay here? Dave might be very close at hand, in which case I could just let him know when he came in the door. Or he might have carelessly left his pack elsewhere while repacking or cleaning, or he might be far off. Given his occasional carelessness (I often wondered how he had survived so long without detection), he might even have run for it and forgotten to put the blanket on the hamper.
I decided I could spare him five minutes for a quick look through the rooms; if his pack was on the kitchen table or by the hot tub, as I’d found it before, I’d tease him later but take it with me. Otherwise, I’d take my jump bag and leave a circle-and-dot, which means “I have gone home”—it was one of those very old trail signs from god knew where in the past. I hoped he would interpret that to mean “Go to the new hot spring,” and that it would be sufficiently cryptic if anyone else found it.
I walked through all the rooms quickly, not seeing his pack. One of the three doors that I had always assumed were closet doors in his sleeping room was standing open, light coming out of it. When I took a step forward, I saw, through the open door, beyond what I had thought was a closet, a big room. A finished ceiling and wall were visible through the mock closet. Not yet thinking clearly—it had been a day with too many surprises—and still looking for Dave, I walked through the closet and into the big room.
My first thought was not especially profound; it was only that Dave couldn’t have made this space with a shovel and pick. The walls, floor, and ceiling, now that I could see the whole room, were finished with tile, the overhead lights were running off real power fixtures and didn’t seem to be just long-life lanterns, and the whole place seemed more like a lab or a workroom. At first I thought the object in the center of the big room was a large worktable, then that it was a raised bathtub. I got closer to it, and said, softly, “Dave? Dave, are you back here? We got big trouble.”
I took another step, and now I realized what that big object was: a suspended animation tank.
Stuff clicked. Dave had been able to disappear for so long because he’d been sleeping under this hill. No wonder nobody could find him. Probably his story about the packloads of dirt was a convenient lie. Most of the “scavenged” stuff had probably been stored down here for him. When he did wake up, with common germs having diverged for many years from what he had gone to sleep with, he got a whopping cold as soon as he went where any other human being had been, and if he—or whoever he worked for—hadn’t planned for it, he’d had to steal medicine.
It seemed ominous that this hideout had always been intended as a one-person place; whatever he was doing with his band of cowboys, he hadn’t ever intended to take them along. He couldn’t, with just one tank available.
No wonder, when we were planning the new cave, so many ordinary technical and engineering things had seemed to be mysteries to him. He hadn’t designed this place—all he knew was how to operate it. The place had been set up by whoever he worked for.
“Currie, that better be you in there,” he said. His voice came from a doorway in the corner.
I froze for a second. “Yeah, it is. I didn’t mean to nose around, Dave, but we’ve got a situation. I had a relapse of Resuna this afternoon and I don’t know how much it uploaded to One True. I think we have to run for the new hot spring.”
He came out from the back. He was naked, except for a dozen medical sensors hanging from his head, neck, chest, and back, and carrying his jump bag.
“You better tell me about that,” he said.
I sketched it out for him quickly—getting hurt, losing my temper, and saying the words to invoke Resuna. “Honest, Dave, I really didn’t mean to do that—”
“Oh, I believe you, for whatever good that does either of us. I can’t imagine that twenty years of habit breaks that easy. It ain’t anybody’s fault; something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. So it took you over and then what happened?”
“I skied down to put the stuff into the cache, but I went straight across the meadow. It was all new powder down there, and I left tracks that are bound to be picked up from orbit. Might as well have painted a bull’s-eye around the cache. Not to mention that I’m sure, as often as we’ve traveled between there and here, they’re going to follow my track back here—if they don’t already know exactly where we are and what we’re doing. I figure that when my copy of Resuna woke up, it probably just automatically carried out the job I had been doing when it took over. That’s something that Resuna does, because you want it to work on what’s important if you’re in an emergency. Then after it got the stuff into the cache and wasn’t sensing as much anxiety from me, it probably commed One True, via satellite, and told it everything. I figure they’ll be here inside an hour.”
“Well,” he said, “do you know for sure that you phoned One True? Or did you just assume that you must have because Resuna had control for a while?”
“That was what I assumed; it’s what Resuna would do.”
“Then I can put both our minds at a little ease. One reason why it took you so long to wake up, I suspect, is because back when I first had you captured and unconscious, to be on the safe side I hooked up your jack to some electronic stuff I’ve got and zapped it a bunch of ways—RF, high voltage, low-level DC current, even a tickle of plain old one-ten sixty-cycle AC (though I put you in line with a big resistor for that). Probably didn’t do your brain much good, but if it was possible to fry that jack, I fried it. I know I ran a big risk with your brain and all, but you know, at the time I didn’t know you and I was still deciding whether to kill you. And I’m real glad now that I don’t seem to have done any permanent brain damage. But I’m also glad that I did try to cook that little gadget, because it’s probably good and dead, and chances are that when your copy of Resuna woke up, after you got whacked on the skull, it just ran in your head until you were conscious enough to take over again.”
“That is reassuring,” I said, “and no hard feelings about my brain. As much as I bang it around, who knows where any one piece of damage might’ve come from? Still, the ski tracks are pointing out that cache, and so we’re bound to lose that, and when they find it they’ll find their way here, quick enough, pos-def. We’ve made a good twenty trips out to it, and by now we’ve surely left enough track for any decent hunter to follow, even with varying the route all the time. So the hunters are going to be at that cache sometime tomorrow, at latest, and then they’ll be here within a few hours. They might could be here in as little as three hours, if the satellite saw the track right away and everybody jumped on it. And if it was three hours—well, between one thing and another, about half of that time is burned already, with time spent getting here and the time we’ve been talking.”
“Well, then,” Dave said, “we’ve got sleeping bags up there already, we’ve got our jump bags packed—I was just putting in some of the medicines you need to take for a few years after a suspended animation, so I’ll go back and grab the rest of my stash of those. At least it would make sense to go up to the new cave and stay up there a few days, then real cautiously come down and see what’s happened to home base here, if anything. While we’re up there, anyway, we can do some digging, and move a couple of the caches up into the new place too if we take that slow and careful. The only thing that’s frustrating is that I got a nice cow elk, plump for this time of year, and didn’t have time to do more than gut her out and hang her up. We’ll probably lose that meat, and I was really looking forward to some nice steaks in a couple days. Other than that, though, I’m ready to go if you are.”
“You might want to put some pants on,” I pointed out. “It is still February, you know.”
Ten minutes later, jump bags on our backs, we were gliding off toward Ute Ridge. The way I figured it, surely Dave knew he had some explaining to do, and he’d get around to it soon enough, without
my prompting. Meanwhile, with some prospect of escape—and a possibility that I had not irrevocably blown everything—the world didn’t seem quite so desperate. It wasn’t exactly the best situation, but it was still considerably better than what I’d had not long before.
We did the last two and a half miles in deep darkness—the moon hadn’t even risen yet, and while starlight is surprisingly bright at high altitude on a field of snow, still all you can really see is silhouettes, and not even that amid the trees. When we got close, and had to pass deeper into the shadows, we pulled on starlight goggles to make our way in. We took skis in with us, leaving them on the upper shelf, and then, once we were inside, had a quick cold meal from the cache there, and then stretched out in the sleeping bags, on the clay-mud floor, not far from the dribble of hot water.
From where I lay, I could just see over the upper shelf and a little bit out the opening, which was obscured every few seconds by a puff of fog, as cold air from outside met the warm wet air that rose from this cave. I saw a bright star, flickering violently, disappearing and reappearing in the fog, through the little cave mouth, and figured out in my head that it might be half an hour before the star moved out of sight from this angle, but before I even saw it move toward the edge, I was asleep.
<> The sun never shone down that hole directly, but enough bounce light came through in the morning to wake me up. The dim light from overhead made our new home even less attractive than a cave in the woods usually is. Well, with enough work, maybe we’d get this place fixed up fit to live in, though I doubted it would ever be anything like as nice as the place Dave had built before. Or rather the place he had lived in, I reminded myself. He probably hadn’t built it; more likely he had just lived there, and whoever he worked for, or used to work for, had built and stocked the place.