Candle

by Barnes, John

  “Well,” Monica said, “take a look in your bag, and if we don’t find it, we’ll go in and look for it.”

  Robin looked and couldn’t find it, so she and Monica went inside together. While they were in there, Phil got out a set of jacks and a ball—neither Cecile nor Dave had ever seen any such thing before—and started teaching them to play jacks. At first Dave couldn’t see the point, but after a few minutes he and Cecile were starting to see what it was about, and pretty soon they were engrossed in a game, coached by Phil. Dave thought it was bizarre that a grown-up genuinely cared how the two of them played a game—or seemed to get such a kick out of watching them do it—but it was bizarre in the nicest way he’d ever seen.

  After about half an hour, Monica returned with Robin and the picture. Robin was holding her hand and her eyes were shining; it was obvious that Monica had just become her hero. “Can you believe it?” Monica said in a tone of outrage. “She had left it behind on top of her locker, because she wanted to pack it on top of her bag, and they made her hurry out so fast she forgot it—and they saw it and even though our diskster was sitting right in front of the building, they didn’t come out and tell us—they had already thrown it away! We had to pull it out from the recycler hopper, and I made them let us use their scrubber to clean it. It’s good as new now, but imagine treating a photo of Robin’s mother that way!”

  “Well,” Phil said, “we’re done with that place for good, thank heavens. Time to get rolling again.”

  They all strapped in because the trip out of the city would be zigzaggy; Phil promised they’d all play jacks again. “Many times,” he added, emphatically. “There might never be a last game. You might still be playing in the old-folks home.”

  Dave and Cecile giggled at that, and after making sure everyone was comfortable, Phil told the diskster an address in the KC Dome, and it extended the thousands of tiny pins from its surface, charged up into a faint, crackling blue glow, and shot off faster than Dave had ever moved before. For all three kids it was their first diskster ride.

  After they had ridden for some miles, and were racing over the empty plains, Robin whispered to them, “She was so mad at them for throwing out my mom’s picture! And she made them fix everything. It was so koapy. It must be like that to have a mom.”

  Dave nodded, trying to appear wise to such things. He turned to look out the window. It was a day full of amazing things—a diskster ride, a long trip, adult attention…

  One advantage of the war not yet being completely on, just yet, was that you could still cross the country in a diskster. The Comasus diskster stopped at the municipal orphanages in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, picking up two to four children between five and ten years old at each one, and by the time it set down in front of a huge fake-Victorian house in upstate New York, the kids had all gotten some acquaintance with each other, Monica had settled a quarrel or two, Phil had taught them a number of silly songs, and everyone had been measured for new clothes.

  The thirteen newly acquired orphans had all been admonished to call Phil and Monica by their first names, and to not to worry about anything, because they were getting taken care of from now on.

  Dave told me, as we threw clay into the hole, that his first sight of the Big House would “probably be the last thing to fade from my brain on the day I die, and if anybody ever could prove to me that there was a heaven and it was as good a place as the Big House, I’d be happy to die that minute.”

  It was late in the evening, but the moon was up and bright, when they followed the winding track up from the small, shallow, ice-covered river through the pines to the top of the ridge, crested the top, and decelerated over the wide snowfield that spread out in front of them. In the moonlight the house was all silvers and blues; it was three stories high, with a main body as big as the Municipal Orphanage back home—no, that’s not home anymore. Dave thought with something close to pure glee—and two sizable wings extending from it. At the time, Dave thought it looked like a house in a story set somewhere in history, like you could see on the flashchannel when the bigger boys weren’t keeping it tuned to sports. Later he realized that it wasn’t really laid out like any of those; the immense wraparound porches on each wing, the big flat diskster landing area in the front, the extremely tall and steep metal roofs—with the black circles on them that he did not realize at the time were automatic gun-ports—all made it very much a twenty-first-century building. Still, to the naive eye, it might have been an old resort house, from back when people had come up from the city to spend summers in this part of the country.

  The diskster flared off its surplus charge in a blue whoosh and settled onto its pad. In a few minutes, Phil and Monica had awakened everyone, sorted out baggage, and organized a groggy parade into the immense main room of the house. It was just settling into Dave’s mind that these two people owned this magnificent place, the way that he owned his shoes.

  Of course the first thing they did was send all the kids into the large ground-floor bathroom—many people, kids especially, just can’t use the bathroom on a diskster, and they hadn’t stopped since Detroit, two hours earlier.

  When everyone had returned from that first necessity, Monica took a quick roll, and then led them downstairs. Dave thought that this was probably where the boys’ and girls’ barracks would be, but instead they went into a big room where an industrial faxbricator sat by a large pile of folded clothing. Phil and Monica went forward and began sorting through the pile, eventually making up thirteen smaller piles of new clothes.

  Before departing on their child-gathering trip, the Comasuses had loaded that faxbricator with bolts of forty different fabrics; Phil had zapped the kids’ measurements on ahead, and when they arrived, handed a pile of brand-new clothes to each kid. All the clothes fit, and had the kid’s own name sewn into them. They had even paid attention to favorite colors, and put kid-selected designs on the sweatshirts and Tshirts.

  When he got his pile, Dave just grabbed the first thing on the top and sat right down on the floor, holding his green Bobbert the Space Tiger sweatshirt—his favorite color and his favorite flashchannel character. It had “Dave Singleton” on the label. They had even made sure it was a soft label made to rest against his neck comfortably, not a big scratchy one sewn in for the convenience of an institutional laundry. He was trying very hard to understand that this sweatshirt—exactly what he had wanted for at least two years—was now all his, brand new, absolutely clean and never worn by anyone else. He clung to it for a long while, pressing his face against it.

  “You can put it on now, if you want,” Monica said, “but you might just want to carry it up to your room, along with everything else.”

  “Carry it up to the moon?” Dave asked.

  Monica’s eyes twinkled. At the time, she was about thirty-five, but to a five-year-old, all adults are terribly old. Dave looked at her closely and curiously, for the first time. She had explosions of tiny laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, and an oversupply of very light-colored freckles. In her jet-black hair there were already a few strands of gray. Her voice was low, modulated, the sort of voice that, before AIs, could have made a fortune in voice-overs.

  Dave was in love instantly, as were all twelve of the other children. “Not carry it to the moon,” Monica said. “You’re not quite ready for that, Dave, though you might be some day. Carry it to your room. Come on, I’m going to show everybody where their room is.”

  Dave joined a parade of the other small kids—himself and Cecile, from Denver; a dark haired girl, terribly thin, with pallid skin and a vampire-red mouth, about eight, named Julia, from the Chicago orphanage; Prester, about Dave’s age, a very thin, dark-skinned kid, with big expressive eyes, crooked teeth, and extremely funny jokes, from St. Louis, who Dave was already hoping would become a friend; a quiet boy who might have been a mix of any or all races, named Joey, who was a lot taller than Dave but acted about the same age, and so might be another friend.

 
; They were all going to what Monica called “West Third.” She explained that it meant that their bedrooms were on the third floor of the west wing of the house. Dave had never been in a house with a wing before, but he figured out what that meant after some momentary confusion. (He really would not have been surprised if the house had turned out to be able to fly, after everything that had happened that day. Maybe to the moon.)

  The five children were shown the bathroom they were to share, each given towels with their names on them, shown the games, books, and small table that had been placed in a wide spot in the hall. Each of them had a room with a desk and chair, closet, bookshelves (and some books on them—and Dave was pretty sure that all of those were new, just like the clothes), bed, chest, and as far as Dave could see, everything you could possibly want in a bedroom, even including a door. “Remember when you want to talk to someone else to knock on his or her door, and wait for the person to say ‘Come in,’ and don’t come in unless they say it,” Monica said. “And they’ll do the same for you. That way you’ll always be able to feel like this is your space.”

  She gave them all a snack—the idea of cereal before bed, just because it would feel good, was strange, but Dave decided he liked it. Then they all got to take showers, and everyone had a brand-new toothbrush and toothpaste. Dave had never been quite so clean, or gone to bed in a room that was neither too hot nor too cold, or felt such clean sheets before. Monica even tucked him in—something he had only seen on the flashchannel—and said good night.

  As he drifted off to sleep, he could hear the sounds coming down the hall, from East Third and East Second. The bigger kids were getting showered, laughing and talking. Phil was hanging around down there, it sounded like; they could hear his big booming laugh now and then, and his intense, serious voice explaining things. It sounded like the bigger kids were having a good time too.

  Just before he fell asleep, Dave prayed, for the first time in his life, though he had had no religious instruction and wasn’t even sure he knew who he was asking to help him. Nonetheless he prayed with all the passion and sincerity a seven-year-old can manage. He wanted all this to be here when he woke up.

  <> Perhaps the greatest miracle was that it was. Shortly after dawn, Dave was awakened by Phil knocking on the door and saying, “Get up, get dressed (put clean stuff on, if you’ve worn it, we’ll wash it), use the can, and come downstairs. Breakfast in ten minutes.”

  As Dave pulled on his miraculously still-present green Bobbert sweatshirt, he could hear the thumps and chatter of other kids getting up, and by the time he had taken his turn at the bathroom he heard a babble of voices downstairs. The dining room and main kitchen were on the first floor of the west wing, and he raced Prester all the way down the stairs.

  Breakfast today would be ham, pancakes with apple compote, and orange juice. Everyone was used to pancakes because they were a staple of orphanage food, but most had never had apple compote, orange juice was an occasional treat, and ham had been mostly for holidays, and strictly rationed.

  When breakfast was finally finished, they all went upstairs and learned the rules for keeping their rooms—just simple things like hanging up clothes, putting dirty clothes in hampers, keeping things on hooks and shelves and not on the floor, making the bed, dusting, all much simpler than following the rules about your bunk in the orphanage, since here at the Big House you had a place for just about everything, and all you had to do was put things where they belonged and wipe surfaces off. Then they went on a tour of the house and, since the day was mild, put on coats and hats and went out and built snowmen on the lawn. Pretty soon everyone was running around and laughing, throwing little unpacked snowballs. Phil showed them some games you could play in the snow, and everyone had a good time with those, even the older kids.

  About the time that they were ready to be tired and cold, but were not quite there yet, Monica ushered them back into the house, where they hung up their coats and hats, put their boots on the drying grate, and then filed back into the dining room. Phil announced lunch: hot dogs, french fries, baked beans, and hot chocolate—and once again, all that you wanted of everything.

  After lunch, as they settled into a pleasant stupor on the couches and chairs in the big room called the “Commons,” Monica read them a story—there had been one nice woman at the orphanage who read stories, Dave recalled faintly, but she had been laid off before he was five, and this was the first time he’d heard a story, instead of seeing one on the flashchannel, in a couple of years. It was difficult to follow it without the pictures and without being able to click on things for explanations, but it was still very nice of her, Dave thought. The littler kids seemed to take to it better than the big ones.

  Then she took them all to West Second, which turned out to have a classroom in it, with thirteen big desks, one for each of the kids. “This is where you’ll all go to school,” she explained. “There are other workrooms and project spaces as well, and a library over in East First, where you’ll work much of the time on your own, but this space will be home base, where usually your day will begin and end, and most days you’ll be here for at least a couple of hours—sometimes for the whole day.”

  They were all so startled by the first thing that she had said that most of them didn’t catch the rest. She had to repeat her entire spiel a couple of times. In most places, for at least the last ten years, orphanage kids hadn’t been allowed to go to school, either because all the public schools had been closed as part of the Gray Decade’s economy measures, or because if there were public schools, orphans were excluded as “not taxpayer children.”

  Once they realized that Monica really did mean that they would all be getting regular schooling, just like rich kids, they were wildly excited. They got a few minutes to explore their desks, discovering pencils, crayons, a brand-new werp for each of them, reams of paper, several books—which Monica assured them they would be taught to read—and too many other miracles to even categorize in those first exciting minutes.

  Then Phil came in. He sat down on the desk at front and said, “I suppose you’re all normal enough to be wondering why we brought you here and what we’re going to do with you. So I’m going to tell you. If it seems weird to you, well, it sometimes seems weird even to me. But I think you’ll like it here, basically, and mostly it will be a step up from where you were.”

  Dave was willing to grant that point.

  “Many years ago,” Phil said, “I was one of the designers of the transfer-ship societies. The transfer ships are the huge spaceships that look like bright stars at night, and come in near Earth every few months, like the Flying Dutchman and Diogenes, the ones that run in the big cycler orbits to supply the colonies on other planets. What I did, along with half a dozen other people, was to plan and help create the system of child-rearing and education that was then used to produce the first generation born on the ships, the people who operate them now. I also had something of a hand in planning the basic social rules under which they grew up, and the culture into which they would grow. I was hired to do that because they needed to produce a whole bunch of very smart people who got along together really well, and who would help to save the human race, and I was well known as a teacher, as a scientist, and for some other accomplishments, various other things that need not concern us for the moment, here.”

  Dave later learned that, under his original name, Comasus had been a very young senator from Massachusetts in the 112th Congress, the last US Congress ever to meet. He had also shared a Nobel Prize in Economics, and served a few years as Deputy Administrator for the Environment of UNRRA-2.

  “There were some things the other society designers didn’t believe me about, which was how eventually I got fired from my job as society designer, and part of why they’re having the problems they’re having on Mars and Ceres. Given the way events have turned out, they probably believe me now,” Phil went on. “But that’s neither here nor there; on the transfer ships and in the colonies, things have w
orked out, if not as well as they might, at least tolerably well, and nowadays there wouldn’t be anything for me to do even if they hired me back. So, despite being occasionally bitter about it, I am usually able to let that go, and take pleasure in having made a really good try, in my younger days, at saving the world.

  “However, a really good try ultimately makes no difference; only success makes a difference. And it so happens the world still needs saving, and with you guys, and Monica, and a certain amount of plain old luck, that’s just what I’m going to do.”

  The way he smiled at them made Dave feel safe and happy, but something about his tone thrilled the little boy to the bone—it was as if he’d been personally sworn in by Batman or Earth Ranger.

  Phil’s explanation for what he was going to do with them was necessarily simple, because he was talking to a group of quite young children. As they grew, he re-explained and re-explained, and their ability to understand it all increased. Since he often used the same phrases in the process, and so many times the explanation happened in the same rooms, in later years it was very hard for Dave to sort out what he had been told when—his earlier memories were overlaid by later ones and tied into them almost seamlessly.

  Furthermore, when he explained it to me in the cave, as we dug, he told me about it as the ideas occurred to him, not necessarily in the best order for understanding, so there’s not much hope of disentangling it and telling the whole story of Phil and Monica Comasus, the Big House, the kids themselves, the Freecybers, or any of the rest, as anyone experienced it. The best I can do is give a fairly accurate, sorted-out explanation, but you have to keep in mind, that’s not how the kids met up with it. For Dave, as an adult, it was as much a part of him as speaking English.

  Comasus was the originator of the system called CSL education. CSL stood for Cybernetics, Semiotics, and Logic, and it could be described several different ways—as an academic subject in its own right that no one else had realized was needed before, as an abstract stratum underlying every other kind of learning, as a set of techniques that a kid learned to accelerate learning in all fields. Phil alternated between saying he’d invented it and he’d discovered it, sometimes saying that he’d come up with a way for the three older disciplines to easily transfer ideas between them, and sometimes saying that he’d found out that a twentieth-century mathematician, two nineteenth-century polymaths, and a bunch of ancient Greeks and medieval scholastics had all been working on the same problem, and that the answers fit together into a grand idea that made the human brain work better.