Candle

by John Barnes

  "Whoa," I said. I was still holding her hand, and she was pressed close against me; we weren't moving very fast. "Resuna, or One True, or somebody, picked me out of all the guys on Earth?"

  When she responded her voice was oddly flat—more mechanical than it would have been with most other memes. Because Resuna is relatively small, it doesn't have much fine control on things like inflection. "Actually you were picked out of the eligible unattached men who would be passing through Quito this week. Mary Roder has a common problem that comes up during recovery; in the process of healing and learning to look forward to her future again, she has begun to romanticize more than would be optimal for a healthy emotional life. She needs to have an experience with someone who will not be rough, impatient, or rude, but whom she sees as strong enough to protect her—basically a sensation of complete safety—but she needs to not fall too completely in love. So a handsome, kind, courteous stranger is what is called for, and that is you, Currie Curran. If you don't wish to do this, we'll find someone else without much difficulty, but you were the first choice. And we of One True know enough of your life to know that you must be very lonely and unhappy; an evening with company and affection would hardly harm you."

  "Can Mary hear you saying this?"

  "No. In just a few minutes she'll become conscious without realizing that she walked this distance with you while unconscious. Meanwhile, do you want to do this? If not, she can lose interest."

  I thought about it for a moment. It was strange to have my arm around her waist while another mind talked for her. She wasn't really my type, I suppose, but it had been a long time, and I was lonely, and the thought of being all alone in some anonymous hotel was unattractive. "I'd like to," I said. "And I'll be as gentle and patient as you need me to be."

  "As Mary needs you to be," Resuna corrected me. "And you would not have been selected had we not known what we do of your past. Your feelings are very straightforward, reasonable ones; you love those who love you back, you hate those who hurt them, you give your loyalty to things you think are worthy. It's that simplicity which Mary Roder needs.

  "Before I bring Mary Roder's personality back, there are two things you need to know. First, you may either continue this relationship or not; we will see that the memory is a good one for Mary, as long as you help by creating pleasant experiences to work with. If you do wish to continue, you may stay with Mary after you are turned.

  "Second, and this is very important: the cue phrase that enables Resuna to take over and deal with emotional distress is 'Let overwrite, let override.' If Mary appears to become hysterical or catatonic, if she acts in ways that seem unusual or unhealthy, if she begins to cry uncontrollably or shows any other sign of real distress, speak that phrase, firmly, until she hears it. That will bring Resuna to the front of her mind to deal with the crisis."

  "You can't just come on your own?"

  "Resuna is systematically limited; if it had the power to overpower human minds, it would have the power to contemplate resistance to One True, and that cannot be permitted. Do you have any question?"

  "No, I don't."

  "A public diskster will pick you both up in a few minutes. It will take you to Buenos Aires Dome, where there's a hotel room waiting. No charge—it is One True's way of thanking you for helping Mary."

  I walked along with her body, around a slow bend in the road, for maybe ten minutes, turning the alternatives over in my head. I was really not seeing any likelihood of any problems I couldn't handle, and the idea was more attractive every time I thought it through. At last I said, "All right, I'll do it."

  "Remember," the Resuna voice said, "Mary Roder will not remember we had this conversation, and as far as she is concerned, the last seventeen minutes and twenty seconds never happened. Enjoy yourself, treat Mary well, and remember you have One True's gratitude. Are you ready for me to release her back into her body?"

  "I guess so."

  With a subtle shift in her body, Mary regained control and consciousness. "Since I was already here in Quito, it's where my job is and all, and they knew you were applying, they sent me up here to meet you. And I think you're really great-looking and you've been so nice and well—there. Now I told you. But I approached you all on my own. Really. I just got some hints about what to say from Resuna. So if we, you know, do it, you'll be with me, not with Resuna, and we don't have to rush or anything if you want to take your time and get to know each other first. What do you think?"

  "I think I ought to com for a nice high-speed diskster, and hire it on my credit to take us somewhere nice, have dinner on the diskster, spend a while looking at scenery and messing around, check into a hotel room, mess around some more, and just kind of see what happens," I said. "Have you ever been to Buenos Aires?"

  <> "So what exactly happened?" Dave asked. "You woke up the next morning with a jack in your head, or she talked you into talking to a terminal for a while, or you fell in love and decided to stay?"

  "Mostly that last one," I said. "Mary was very attentive and very affectionate. And I was just twenty-five, even if I was a widower, and I'd only ever been with Tammy before, and it had been years, and so at first I was probably just there for the sex and the not being lonely part. Then I got kind of hooked on being her hero, I guess you'd have to say, and after that I started to see that she really needed me—and by then it was November 15, a beautiful spring in Buenos Aires, the warmest on record—and way too late to make any plans to run away, and so one evening I came back from having a jack put in, and we made love, and she plugged me into the phone and held my hand, and when I woke up I was turned, and running Resuna. We held a party to celebrate. And now we've been married twenty-three years. And this is the first time since 2062 I've really had a free thought about whether or not I like her, or what kind of a wife she's been."

  Dave nodded slowly, as if digesting the whole situation. "What do you think?"

  "I think I miss her at the moment. I hope she's not too worried. I'd like to see her again."

  He smiled. "Well, good, then. Another glass?"

  "Pos fuckin' def."

  "And can I trust you not to tie me up and turn me in if we get very drunk tonight?"

  "Yeah, I think so."

  "Good enough." He raised his glass. "My story's not as dramatic, so we're going to need more wine."

  <> Dave's tale didn't take long. He was a foundling in Denver Dome, a few years after I was dropped off at Spokane Dome—we both thought it was pretty funny (with help from the wine) that we theoretically could be brothers. He'd been in a couple of mercenary units before being hired as part of the bodyguard for a Freecyber cell in upstate New York, within fifty miles of where I was stalking Murphy's Comsat Avengers.

  He'd liked working for the Freecybers—he said they were pleasant employers, met their bills, didn't ask for the impossible, treated you like people—but it came to an abrupt end when Murphy's unit overran them and butchered the people they were guarding. "No call for it, either," he said. "They could have just turned them. It was pretty close to the end of the war. Could've just put One True into them, and I bet that's what One True would have preferred. Murphy's was the only mercenary company I ever heard of that regularly killed just for fun; it was like a whole outfit of serial killers."

  I nodded and took a big slurp of the wine, which was absolutely delicious. "Yeah. You know where Murphy came from? He was nothing more than an old vag at the time the war broke out. There probably weren't two thousand vags left on the planet in 2049, but unfortunately, he happened to be one of them."

  Dave shrugged. "I knew a couple of former vags, myself. One of them and I went sniping a few times, because he was so crazy he'd go show himself on the skyline to draw fire—he lasted about a week, I think. All the old vags I knew were crazy. Most of them were people who just never got over losing something, and spent their lives in the woods, robbing and looting, trying to get it back, pathetic crazy bastards who were dangerous to anyone they ran into, but otherwis
e not anything much to worry about. Murphy was something else again entirely, a lot more than just crazy. He was about as evil and sick a bastard as the poor old world has ever seen and it's a good thing his delusions made him too incompetent to get anywhere."

  "Amen," I said, and extended my glass in a toast; we clinked them together, and I said, "I saw him die. You could call it a mixed pleasure. I had always hoped to get the fucker myself, and the first time I was about to get a good shot at him, two of his own men did it. The three of them were out in front of his tent, talking about what to do now that peace was here, and he was going on in some crazy riff about putting the comsats back up—like anyone needs them with the supras there. Then he grabbed one of them by the shirt, and the other one shot him. I was so startled that I muffed my first shot at one of them, so they both got away."

  Dave nodded firmly. "You at least got in a good try at them. Me, once Freecyber was gone, I didn't have any side in the war, so I just went into the bush. Here's a strange thought. I didn't have nearly as much grudge against One True as you did, and if One True had made me the offer to become a cowboy hunter—even without being memed, just hunting cowboys in exchange for my keep—I might have taken it. And from what you tell me, if you hadn't run into Mary on that road, you might have drifted into cowboying, or whatever it was called up the Northeast. We could've been on switched sides. Funny how life cuts."

  "Yeah," I said. The warm water and the wine were getting a dead solid grip on me, and I was fading fast. "I'm starting to think of bed," I admitted.

  "Me too, Currie. Let's drink up. There's not much left of these bottles."

  There wasn't much left of his; there was about a quarter of mine, but I pounded it right down like a dumbass teenager anyway. He took my glass, reached to an overhead shelf, and handed me a bar of soap. "Oatmeal soap, for rich ladies to scrub their dingy skin with," he said cheerfully. "Don't worry about it making you pretty, it didn't make them pretty." He guffawed at his own joke and I did too; we were pritnear as drunk as I've ever been. When he got out to soap up, he nearly fell, and I got out very slowly; it's not easy when you're holding a bar of soap in one hand, and you really wish you had both hands to hang onto the floor with.

  We both soaped up all over, working up thick lather in our hair and beards. A couple of knotted, crusty scars were on the back of my head, which probably meant that whatever Dave had done to the back of my head with his club should have had stitches but hadn't gotten them. Oh, well, I was alive, and not memed, and thinking as myself.

  When we had finished lathering, Dave carefully put our pieces of soap back on the shelf, and said, "Just be sure you don't stay with your head under too long. I can't think that would be real good for a guy with a recent brain trauma."

  We climbed back in, the hot water feeling good after the cool of soaping up, and swished around in the water, getting the soap off and the last kinks out. I let myself slip down and put my head under. In water that's warmer than body temperature, with a skinful of wine, putting your head under hits like a sledgehammer, and you can easily pass out, but I let myself hang for a moment in that blissful almost-not-there state, so relaxed that my muscles seemed to just blend into the surrounding water. If Dave had wanted to kill me, that moment then would have been a good time; I'd probably have slipped over to the other side without caring.

  But clearly he didn't. I suppose decades without a friend do things to a man; the thing that seemed strangest to me was that he was still fairly good at getting along with people, after all that loneliness.

  I let the warmth fill my whole body, then sat back up, splashing and wiping the water from my face. "I don't suppose you've got—"

  "But of course," he said. "I built my towel closet with racks that carry hot water. All towels are always dry, fluffy, and hot."

  "Damn, you know how to live." I got out and he tossed me a towel; I dried myself thoroughly. It felt good to be alive. "Dave, if you don't want to be turned, I am not going to turn you. And since you can't trust me if I'm turned, I guess I'm out in the woods for good, myself. You'll have to teach me most of the mechanics of living out here, and I'll have to depend on you for a while, but I'll construct a place of my own, if you prefer, just as fast as I can. And I guess we both have to move, anyway, because there's bound to be some of them looking for me in a couple-few weeks, once some of the spring melt has happened, plus of course they had enough uploads from my copy of Resuna, the last few days before you caught me, to have you pritnear dead solid located."

  Dave sighed. "Well, we're both in a sloppy sentimental mood. Been a long time since I've had a partner, and living out in the woods without anybody else is lim, lim hard. But you gotta think about things like the fact that you wouldn't see Mary again, ever, probably, and I got to think about whether I'm letting my feelings blind me. So let's sleep on it, get up late, talk it over ... you know, the usual kind of thing you do when you know what you want to do, but you want to be sure you want to. You know?"

  "If I had a few more brain cells running I'm sure that would be perfectly clear," I said. "Sure, see you in the morning."

  He didn't even lock my door; I had the funny thought, as I fell asleep, that I might be about to become a cowboy, but I sure as hell wasn't ever going to put any dumbass-looking Stetson on.

  <> Next morning the menu was jerked venison, canned beans, pickled grouse eggs, strong coffee, and plenty of aspirin. We didn't say much till we got enough of all that stowed in our guts so that we felt sort of human, and then we took a vote and it was unanimous that we ought to go take a nap. It must've been another three hours before we staggered out, guts stabilized, heads only oppressively fuzzy instead of overwhelmingly thick, and had some more coffee, plus some jackrabbit stew he'd canned the summer before. "Well," Dave said at last, "that was one hell of an evening. Haven't had a blowout like that in decades, literally."

  "Me either," I said. "Felt pretty good, even if I wouldn't want to do it more than four or five times in a year. To let you know, I still think I'd rather throw in with you. I'd rather be your friend than not, and this is the only way to be your friend. As for Mary, yeah, I miss her, and she has some good qualities and so forth, but you know, there's a whole lot of energy that has gone into taking care of her, and much as I hate to admit it, I'd have decided she wasn't worth it, probably within a few weeks, if Resuna hadn't been steering my thoughts. So I'm about twenty-five years overdue for an awakening from the romance, and though I wish her all the best, and though I would gladly take care of her just out of duty, and enjoy her company ... well, Resuna will take very good care of her, and she'll be just fine. I'm leaving her in a situation much safer and more comfortable than I ever left Tammy in. So if you'll take me on, and teach me enough of what you know, I'd be happy to be your neighbor out here, or your partner if you don't mind sharing quarters. I'll do more than my share of the work to make up for not supplying my share of the knowledge."

  Dave sat back in his chair, put two more aspirin in his mouth, took another gulp of coffee to wash them down, and said, "You worry way too much about what's fair, and about my privacy, Currie. I'd dearly love to have a partner. With two of us working we can make our new place big enough to have rooms for both of us. I know you'll pull your freight. And if you are just going to turn me in, well, that idea is so discouraging that I'd just as soon not think or worry about it at all, so I'm not." He stuck his hand out, we shook, and we were partners.

  That afternoon we got going on the subject of where to move and when. Over his years of wandering around in the mountains, Dave had picked out several other places with easy-to-tap geothermal heat, none with as abundant a flow as this one. "Two of them have a sizable surface pool nearby, so if the temperature on that was to start to drop, it's just possible a satellite would spot the difference between how hot the pool used to be and how hot it was now. If they've found this place by then, well, then they'd know my basic way of surviving, they'd be looking for changes around hot springs, and we'd be in
deep shit. Out of all the hot springs sites I've found, there's only one that drains back into the ground without breaking the surface and flowing down to some creek. It's on the leeward side of Ute Ridge, a little ways up, in a cave that's probably an earthquake crack that got weathered out bigger and then had some runoff flowing through it at one time—there's a slide up above that I figure must have turned off the flow. There's some room in there and plenty of stuff solid enough to dig out for more as we need it—though it's not going to be the pleasant easy digging that this old mine gave me. And so far, anyway, checking that spring for years, it hasn't gone dry or surged up. Problem is, it's reliable but it ain't plentiful—there's maybe half a gallon per minute or so, enough to give us heat and some hot water, but nothing like the four and a quarter gallons per minute I got here."