Candle

by John Barnes

  To my right, down slope, a wide swath of thick fir mingled with pine trees stood tall; to my left, a scraggly line of windblown firs underscored the ridgeline. The sun now stood low in the sky behind me, washing amber light across the untracked snow and making the edges of the shadows of the trees and rocks glow deep blue.

  I came around another bend and saw a ruin. Though the main buildings were buried under three meters of snow, the huge, green-painted metal towers marching up the hillside off to my right plainly showed that this had been a small ski area. The stretched, sharp-angled shape in the snow before me had been the lodge, its back now broken in two places and the glass long since shattered and knocked down by the building settling under the weight of the snow that no one swept off. A couple of rings of walls nearby were probably places where hotels, restaurants, or stores had suffered a roof collapse, with the long-fallen roof now buried under this year's snow.

  My first wife Tammy and I had spent one of my rare ten-day leaves at a place not too different from this, back when we were teenagers. It had cost me about three months of my earnings as a corporal in Burton's Thugs for Jesus—and it had been worth every penny. Somewhere in my files I still had a picture of our daughter, Carrie, three years old, then, in her pink snowsuit.

  I stood for a long time, looking down at the ruined lodge. For a moment, I imagined the tired people skiing in from the last run of the day, breathing hard, their muscles aching, piling through the rental checkouts, and gathering in exhausted huddles at the tables and the bars to enjoy having gotten exhausted together.

  The lodge would have had a nice fire, and at least one of the bars would have had a band. I could almost smell the pizza, beer, and sweat.

  Oh well, someday, again. Maybe in my lifetime. Maybe when things got better, with more resources to spare, One True would let me apply to create a new ski resort. Helping people have a good time would be fun in its own right, almost as much fun as tracking them down, I supposed.

  I clumped on around the resort, giving it a wide berth because I didn't want to plunge into the snow-covered remains of a ballroom, abruptly feel a six-condo unit slide down the hill underneath me, or be the final force that shattered the glass roof of a swimming pool, so I had to work my way about halfway up the ridge to be certain that I was above the old resort; that took a while, and the sun was setting by the time I was leaving the ruins behind me.

  The moon was just a day past full, so it would be up shortly and I'd have more than enough light to get near my campsite, but I would camp in the shadows to reduce the chances of being spotted, so the last forty meters would be in the dark. And I knew from too-well-remembered experience that pitching camp in the dark, relying on light-amplifier goggles to do the fine work, was going to be a bitch.

  I thought briefly about delaying setting up camp until daylight—I could lie down in the snow and sleep in the suit, if I had to. But there's not much provision in those suits for taking a really comfortable dump, which counts for a lot with me. Furthermore, if your suit heater system fails, or if your electrets slow-bleed and lose charge during the night, it might be July before you thawed out enough to realize that you were dead.

  Half an hour later, the mountains to the west were outlined by a broad streak of red behind them, and I was finally coming over the ridge to my campsite. The first stars were out, and Resuna said that the moon would be up in seven minutes. Already a silver glow surrounded the ragged palisade of volcanic tuff topping the butte to the east.

  I sat down to wait for the moon, and let my mind run through the memories of the day, for Resuna to upload to One True, thus making them potentially available for the whole human race to share.

  It's not easy to explain about the mountains at that time of year. The life is burrowed deep; most of the world that surround you seems to say that winter will last forever.

  Five minutes after the sun sets it can be cold enough so that you hear your breath snap and bang as it freezes and falls into snow at your feet. That's what thin air will do for you; you're just that hair closer to what it's like to be in outer space.

  And yet the days are longer than they are in December, and during the day, it can be downright hot when the sun bounces off the frozen snow into your face. You hear water breaking loose from its frozen prisons, the distant boom of avalanches tumbling down into valleys, the dance of the firs in the wind. It has no place for you; this is a world where you stick out as if an orange ring were painted on the air around you. You never feel your individual existence more acutely.

  Resuna asked, curiously, if feeling individual felt good. I didn't quite know how to explain it. I had to say that it was a feeling I seemed to need every now and then, but I didn't know whether it was good or bad.

  I looked around slowly. Nothing moved. Hard to believe that this time last night I had been reading an old mystery and having a glass of wine at home, without a thought that I might ever be out here again.

  Here I was, anyway.

  Taking just as long as it would have if I hadn't been impatient, the moon climbed over the hill, huge against the pines. I waited till it lit the up slope in front of me before I went on. I angled up the slope carefully, since even though no doubt they would rescue me quickly if the snow slid, the rescue would alert Lobo and complicate the whole hunt. Besides, my old memories assured me that even one minute spent lying half buried in the snow with a broken leg is way too long.

  A few minutes later I was looking for a low-visibility way over the ridge. I unstrapped from the flexis, set down my pack and duffel, and crept belly down in the rough, crust-covered snow, taking a good ten minutes to cover the last thirty meters to the top. Looking over, I saw broken rock here and there, a few scattered scrubby trees, and a couple of bowls whose edges I could skirt. Could be worse.

  I climbed carefully back down, making sure I wasn't going to start any slides, slung up, and headed for the spot I'd picked out, behind a big promontory that would give me access into a nice dark bowl. It took maybe an hour until I was clumping along in the shallow snow between the trees on the dark side of the bowl; from there, my face-screen map said I'd only have to go about 150 meters to the place I had picked out for a campsite, among some small pinnacles and broken boulders with a couple of trees to cast nice deep shadows on my shelter.

  I got there without any further trouble, switched the face screen to amplify the starlight, and set about the fumbling and fiddling necessary to make camp. First I got the little disk out of the top of the duffel, plugged it into my suit, and waited for it to turn itself into a snow shovel. It took about ten minutes for it to set into shape. I couldn't do much while dragging that thing around—I made a note to Resuna about redesigning this gear so that one or more of the electrets would detach—but meanwhile I got a long drink of warm water from the suit's recovery reservoir, and looked up, through the trees and boulders, at the stars. You'd think I'd be used to how bright they could be, even with a full moon, up here in the mountains, but after so many years, I still never got tired of it.

  When the shovel had set, I dug out the space where I had decided I wanted to put my shelter. At least this snow had not been packed down by anything, and hadn't been exposed to the sun, so it wasn't particularly dense or hard to cut (there was just so much to move, and I couldn't throw it back over my shoulder where it was likely to be visible from below). But I had to throw it forward into the pile of scree, an awkward way to dig that makes you use your chest muscles too much and your back not enough. I was sweating and panting by the time that job was done.

  Next, the shelter itself. I dragged out the big rectangular block, the size of two old-fashioned shoe-boxes, with an oval opening on the top. It was a structurer—it needed chon, carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen, to operate on. I set it down with the arrow that marked the door pointing south, and heaped dead branches, rocks, dirt, and snow on top of it. When the pile was about half a meter higher than my head, the soft chime pinged, letting me know it felt enough mass direct
ly above it. Then I touched the Structure button and stepped back, sitting down on a boulder to sip warm water and watch the shelter make itself.

  First there was a low vibration as it shattered the materials directly above it and pulled them in. After a minute or so, the pile became visibly smaller, and then the black edges of the rapidly forming shelter peeked out from the sides like a doormat rising from a heap of dirty snow.

  Curls of vapor were rising from the pile as the warmth of the shelter was absorbed by the melting snow, and the mounded rubbish shrank as if it were slowly falling into a trapdoor, as more openings on the partially structured shelter formed and drew in the mix.

  I was old enough to remember the days before structurable molecular processing, and this still seemed very weird to me, even if it was just the same process that happened in an ordinary food reconstitutor.

  In a short while that heap of junk I had made was down to being a damp black rectangle that covered about the same area as an old Sears Deluxe Tool Shed, covered with wet twigs, needles, and bark. Then the shelter absorbed the last of those, like a great squashed black amoeba, so that nothing was left but its own slick surface. It pinged, indicating that it was ready for more material.

  Again, I heaped on branches and rocks, and then shoveled on a load of snow, until the self-forming shelter indicated that it was satisfied with the weight on top of it. After a few minutes, the snow and junk had flowed into the dark, lightless surface again, as if sinking into a pool of pure shadow.

  The chemical changes and the rearrangement inside took some silent time, and the only sound was the occasional splash and hiss as snow fell from the branches above and turned to steam on the hot surface. I used the time to sit down in the shadow of a big rock, not far away, where I could look out over the valley. I didn't much hope I'd see a hidden campfire, or a trail, or someone moving around, but if I didn't look, I'd never know.

  I scanned for a long time, surfing through everything from infrared to low X ray, and saw nothing I wouldn't expect to see in the mountains.

  On a feeble thread of a game trail, perhaps four kilometers away and 250 meters lower, I spotted one lone figure slinking along, which just barely might be a man. But switching around to get the right setting on my goggles, I got a good look at it: an old cougar, probably one who had lost his territory and was scavenging where he could (why else be out at night in February?). I felt vaguely sorry for him, but Resuna quietly reminded me that I was here to hunt cowboys, not to rescue cougars, and anyway getting old and incapable was the natural lot of cougars in the wild. He would no doubt find the death that suited him, sooner or later, without my help or worry.

  That made me feel much better.

  I heard a soft creaking noise that anyone any distance away would have attributed to pine boughs. The shelter eased itself upright. With a faint sigh and several loud creaks and cracks, its members went rigid. I turned to see that it had completed itself; all I had to do was throw my stuff inside, walk in after it, close the door, and I'd be "at home." It wasn't my warm, comfortable A-frame with Mary, but for the moment, it would do.

  The pack went in with one toss, the duffel with another, and then I pushed the flexis and shovel in after them. Finally, I got inside, sealed the flap, and said "Light" to the pitch darkness.

  The soft yellow glow came from panels on top of the shelter, and since the shelter walls were fully opaque and the light would go off if the door unsealed, I didn't have to worry about it being seen. The insulating shelter wall also kept heat radiation to a minimum—the shelter itself sent most of the heat to a recoverer to recharge its electrets. So I was now invisible except at very close range, and could relax in my new home.

  Shelters are always too hot on the inside the first night, before their brains catch the rhythm of the outside temperature, so once I had done the minimum unpacking and verified that the bed and linens had generated properly, I took off all my clothes. I stripped out of my outside suit, turned it inside out, and stuffed it into the recoverer, which would clean it thoroughly, extract and purify the water from the reservoirs, scavenge the body salts for anything useful, make sure the electrets were up to full charge, and finally drop out a couple of pebble-sized chunks of waste.

  Naked and comfortable in the warm little room now, I said "Lights down" and dimmed them to the point where I could just see; that always helps me to sleep. I slid a narrow rectangular mealpak into the food reconstitutor, waited a few minutes, and pulled out a tray with two small hamburgers, french fries, and baked beans, which I sat down and wolfed while the reconstitutor turned another pak—this one more cubic—into a pot of hot chocolate.

  Resuna told me that Mary was happy and thinking of me. The thought brought a friendly, warm glow to my heart. The meal and the hot chocolate were working their magic, and the reassurance from Resuna was all I needed; I stretched out on top of the covers, told the bed to wake me at four the next morning, and fell sound asleep. All night I dreamed about old friends who were dead, and the way the world used to be, and the big empty spaces around the pine-covered mountains.

  When the bed squeezed me gently, twice, around the knees and back, I woke instantly. The lights came on dim and red, and a soft voice said "It's time, sir."

  I sat up, enjoying the pleasant warmth of the shelter, dropped the blocks of breakfast and coffee into the reconstitutor, and opened up the toilet side of the recoverer. Back when I had started as a cowboy hunter, we'd still been in tents, and had to make breakfast over a stove and dig our own latrines; the cooking was sort of romantic and quaint, I suppose, but one thing I had been glad to see the end of was the morning dash, through the far-below-freezing thin mountain air, to the slit trench. I told Resuna how much I had enjoyed waking up in camp; it might lead to One True's eventually encouraging more people to go camping.

  After gobbling down the biscuits and gravy and drinking a couple of cups of coffee, I was ready to slip into the outside suit, strap on the day pack, and start the job. It was 6:20, about half an hour before the sun was due to come up. I carefully closed the flap and walked around the outside barrier that kept the brief flash of warmth from being visible through infrared scopes. For today I would be working my way down into the Dead Mule drainage, exploring this north side of it, to see what conditions were like on the ground and look for any places where someone might hide from the satellites.

  I had gone only about 200 meters when what had looked like firm ground turned out to be a snowbank, which slipped away under my feet. For a weird instant, I seemed to hang in air, as if I had lost connection with the ground—the moment of free fall when the snow no longer pushes against your boots—and then a whirling tumble as I got myself turned around, spread out my arms, and let myself fall face first onto the snow behind me, trying to stay up above the real trouble. I slid down the ridge, face down and feet first, for about thirty meters before coming to a stop and tentatively dragging myself forward about three feet to get up off the sliding part of the snow. I slowly rolled over, pointed my feet downhill, and, cursing softly into the face screen, looked down to see what I had done.

  The first light of dawn was just beginning to break over the mountains to the east, and the tops of two mountains to the west were already touched with the arc-brightness of sun on snow. That gave me more than enough light to see by without using the amplifier.

  The snowslide had only traveled 150 meters down the slope, bumping along in a sheet rather than a rolling wave, never more than a meter deep or so. Unless he happened to look right at it when I touched it off, and saw me flopping around on top of it, the slide would look like the most natural thing in the world.

  I sat up, took a sip of water, and let Resuna calm me; the worst I had been risking, probably, was just a plain old broken leg, which they fix pretty quickly these days, even in old guys like me. Something about that phrase, "the most natural thing in the world," was running through my head, the kind of clue that nags at you for days or weeks until you see what it was
trying to call your attention to. Those sometimes turned out useful—and more often led nowhere.

  I scanned the valley slowly, playing with different magnifications and different wavelengths, and the only thing out and moving in the early dawn was a small herd of elk crunching their way down through the snow to drink from Dead Mule Creek, stopping often to look for willow shoots, or grass under the snow, or aspen twigs that they hadn't already chomped down during the long, bleak winter. When I'd been a kid, the government used to send out helicopters to drop hay to the elk, because it upset the voters if the elk starved, and so there were always way more elk than the land could handle naturally. Nowadays, Resuna took care of public upset—and starvation, blizzards, wolves, and cougars took care of the elk—so we had sparse, healthy elk.

  I watched the little herd pick their way down to the firm part of the stream bank, a step at a time, following in each other's tracks. A muscular young bull led the way, turning and sniffing the wind now and then, looking about with huge brown eyes. The elk of the Rockies look like big mule deer, I guess, to the untrained eye, until you realize they're half again as big, and until you see that wild, cunning intelligence looking out of the eyes. In the old days, good hunters loved them and lazy hunters only saw them from the road.

  The bull must have decided it was okay, and began to scrape at the stream bank with his front hooves. Two cows joined him, and a yearling that looked like it would be on his own soon, and shortly they were making all kinds of noise down there, breaking ice, pawing up grass, and having what elk must think is a good old time. In the cold, still dawn air, their breath rose in silvery columns, catching the sun that sliced between the trees above them in white flashes.