Candle

by John Barnes

  "We could put in a tank of some kind, couldn't we?" I pointed out. "The longer we keep the hot water hanging around, the more heat we can extract. We couldn't have an ever-running hot tub-laundromat-dishwasher like you've got here, but we could just do all the washing in shifts; wash and rinse with water from the hot tank, drain it into a warm tank that keeps the place comfortable, put it through the toilet and then discharge it room temperature if you've got a safe hole to put it down."

  I had to draw a couple of sketches of the idea for him—I was mildly surprised at the way the idea didn't seem natural to a man who had built a place as ingenious as this one—but once he got it, he nodded vigorously and added, "I think you've already paid for yourself, Curran. That's a great idea. Far as I know, after it passes through that little cave, the stream runs underground for miles, too—no surface pool anywhere near—so even if we take all the heat from that water, and discharge at room temperature, betcha we still don't show up to the satellites."

  "I guess that's what we are betting on," I agreed.

  <> Two days later I saw daylight for the first time in what I discovered had been nineteen days. Dave's camouflage for the entrance was simplicity itself—it was under an overhang and led onto a long sloping shelf of south-facing dark rock, which must have stayed pretty free of snow most of the time. We walked straight out during one of the no-satellite times, got under the trees, and put on skis—his were old Fiberglass models; I just used my flexis. After a moment or two to check equipment, we were on our way.

  I was a hair rocky on my skis, at first, and we took it slow, going the long way round because it was much more nearly level. It was another beautiful, cloudless, deep blue sky above pure white snow. By the third kilometer or so, I was back in the swing of things, annoyingly short of muscle after all the bed rest, but fundamentally fine.

  You had to be practically falling into the little cave before you even saw the wisps of steam, or the donut of ice like a giant's anus, among the scrubby firs. The opening was an irregular oval, perhaps four feet long by two across. "Getting in's not as hard as getting out," Dave said. "The floor's not far down, and it opens up beyond this point. Just follow me." He set his skis down under the tree, and I did the same; then he braced a hand on either side of the glassy ice of the opening, and more or less swung down into the space, coming to a rest when he was in about up to the bottom of his ribcage. "Tricky spot. This part of the floor is covered with ice," he said. "Have to figure out a faster entrance eventually. Now squat, hope not to fall down, turn real slowly left, stick your legs out, and slide down a slope on your butt. You'll skid down maybe seven-eight foot and land on a pile of scree. I'll be down there with a light."

  He squatted and I heard a scraping sound, a louder and different scrabbling noise, and then finally a crash of spraying gravel, followed by the rattle of him climbing off the scree pile. "Okay, I'm down. Just come to the light."

  If possible, the ice around the opening was slicker than it looked, and wetter. My head seemed to ache as if waiting to be slammed. Gingerly, I put my feet down and found the slick, icy floor; I could see a trace of glare from his flashlight on my boots, coming from my left.

  "Doing fine," he said.

  Very slowly, keeping my weight right over my feet, I crouched and turned. I was in a space less than a meter high and not much wider than the hole on the surface; beside me Dave's light came up from a crack that was about a meter wide and not more than two feet high, into which the floor sloped. I put my feet down the opening and pushed off, hoping that Dave hadn't worked out some incredibly complicated way to cause a cowboy hunter to die where he'd never be found.

  The freezing-cold rock and ice chewed at my ass for an instant. With a momentary lurch, I gained speed. My boots grabbed the scree pile and I finished up squatting on that. Dave was standing there, adjusting his flashlight for use as a lantern. I climbed down carefully and stood beside him.

  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that we were in a big crack in the native granite. It was surprisingly free of dirt, and almost unpleasantly warm. I opened up my suit as Dave took off his jacket. "Well, here it is," he said. "Prospective home."

  In the dim light I could clearly see the basic space—about seven meters that I could see, ending in a bend at one end, varying from two to three meters wide, all high enough so you could walk without bumping your head. A thin trickle of warm water dribbled across the muddy floor, steam rising from it. "It's also hotter than what I've got in the home place now," Dave said, "which I think means your idea will work even better."

  I walked forward and looked to see that the trickle of water emerged from an opening that I could probably have put my arm into, if I'd wanted it scalded. "We could widen and break this out," I said, "or just stick a pipe into it. Probably start with just the pipe and then expand toward the heat, eh?"

  "Sounds logical to me," Dave said. "There's a chamber around the bend, where the hole that drains this is."

  Gingerly, I made my way through that main gallery, following Dave, watching where I put my feet, not caring to dip my boots in the near-boiling trickle. Around the corner, in the short leg of the L-shaped cave, where Dave's lantern shone, we moved into a chamber about two meters square and some inches deeper than the gallery we'd left; the ceiling was higher too, and the hot trickle bit deep into the clay soil floor, vanishing toward the end of the room in a gurgling hiss of steam. "I've probed down that hole, and about a meter below, it seems to widen," Dave said. "We might could try a video camera and monitor, and a light, and see if there's a usable chamber down there to dig to, or even just a good place for one of your storage tanks."

  "Seems promising," I said. "You ever done anything to find out how deep the clay is anywhere in here?"

  "Naw. Wasn't high enough priority till now. For all I know when we dig it out we'll turn up ten more foot of headroom and entrances to six more chambers. Anyway, that's about all there is to it right now. What do you think?"

  I looked at it and thought about how hard I was going to have to work; then about Mary and the cabin; then about what it was like to be awake, in my own skull, without Resuna watching every thought, and I said, "This is gonna sound stupid but I can hardly wait to get started. I guess we bring up the shovels tomorrow, and we start mucking out."

  "Makes sense, if you're ready."

  "Oh, I'm ready," I said. "And here's another thought. We don't have to haul the dirt out and dribble it from a pack. All this clay was carried here by the spring, right? So if we just build a box with a screen on the bottom, that the stream runs through on its way out, and drop the dirt in there, it will be carried downstream underground, where nobody's going to see it. We might see about mucking out the drain first thing, just to see if we can do it that way—because if we can, that makes the whole job simpler. We can be here digging more of the time and we won't be limited by how much dirt we can hide."

  "What happens if we put so much down there that we plug something up, and it starts to back up into the cave?" Dave asked.

  "Then we poke down there with poles and rods, and see if we can smash something to let the water out—and if that doesn't work, we see how far it fills—and if it fills to the top, well, we tunnel in from the side and let it out. Which admittedly kills the advantage of the subterranean drain. But anyway, we've got so much to gain if we can move a few tons a day, instead of a few packloads. We could have a whole new place here inside a year or two if we can wash most of the clay down, instead of carrying it. Wouldn't you say?"

  He shrugged. "Partner, I never thought of that either. I'm just not much of a planner or engineer; purely an improviser and an improver. It's probably a good thing I was the cowboy and you were the hunter, because you damn near caught me, and I don't think I'd've stood a prayer of catching you."

  "Different approaches," I said. "If you and me were hunting a cowboy together, I'd be amazed at how many things were obvious to you, I bet, that I never saw."

  "Might could be,"
Dave said. "Might could be."

  <> There might be something heavier and more uncomfortable than a pack full of canned goods, but I don't want to find out what. The first job, once we realized that we needed to get Dave's place moved, right away, was to get all the really indispensable stuff cached at some distance from it. Canned stuff with Vitamin C was number one on the list; if we had that, we wouldn't get scurvy. If we didn't have that, not only would we be facing scurvy, but we'd have to pick a lot of berries the next summer, and come up with some way to can or dry many pounds of them, and do a great deal of work we wouldn't really want to make the time for.

  After the indispensables for staying alive, dealing with emergencies, and not getting sick, we would move all the nice small things, appliances of one kind or another, that shave so much effort off a day and free up so much time. After that, if we still weren't interrupted, we would gradually move the million and ten small luxuries that could help to make life way out in the woods bearable—books, wine, audio recordings—and finally, if One True left us alone long enough, anything else that we could take before we dropped a load of rocks across the entrance and left forever.

  Caching the portable stuff meant taking it out, a packload at a time, to about twenty different hiding places, since we wanted to make sure we had some of everything in each cache, so that if one of them got found, we wouldn't lose all of any item. What shall it profit a man to keep his dialytic water-purifier membranes, if he lose his canned tomatoes? I was glad that I hadn't been doing this decades before, when Dave and his band had been hiding out here, since there must have been many times this much stuff to carry. Of course, then there had been eleven men doing it.

  It was late afternoon, and I was crossing a high saddle down into Kearney Park, enjoying the colors, smells, and sounds in their near-outlined clarity. I'd made seven trips that day and was looking forward to finishing this one and having an evening soak in the tub. Another week and we should have all the food cached, and then it would only be a matter of a few days to get all the other irreplaceables moved before we could at last begin our excavations in the new cave. If I was right that they wouldn't try to send hunters out again until a thaw was well underway, we'd be doing our excavation comfortably in the shelter of the cave, possibly for weeks or months, while the pursuit grew frustrated, and the scent got cold.

  With luck it might be several years before we were spotted again, and though sooner or later one of these spottings would lead to our capture, at the moment it looked like we had some years of freedom left. And, as I'd explained to Dave, life with Resuna wasn't unpleasant—if Dave hadn't been there and determined to stay out of One True's grip, I'd probably have just gone back to Resuna because it was easier.

  Aside from getting caches sited and filled, we'd made enough time to explore the cave around the new hot spring, probing with some six-foot star drills that had been in the back of an old general store. The water drained into at least one more big chamber below, and we'd also tapped into some openings under the clay that we were optimistic about.

  Meanwhile, though, we had to move the canned stuff. I had a packful of cans of tomatoes, peaches, and sweet potatoes to get into the cache in Kearney Park, before going home. I pushed off to make a slow glide, down through the trees, avoiding any open space too easily watched from orbit. It was harder than usual to safely descend the hard, icy, steep patch in front of me. I had to work at it, turning tight and constantly so that I didn't build up any speed. The extra weight on my back made it much tougher.

  I hurtled back among the trees, still going faster than I really wanted to, and followed a deer trail I knew well through a thick patch of growth. Then a bump turned out to be a log, the ski scraped and jammed, and I flipped forward and landed in a hard face plant.

  I sat up, face stinging from the snow, head aching where forty pounds of tomatoes, peaches, and sweet potatoes had slammed right into the place on the back of my head where I had all the scars. I was all by myself, and feeling half crazy with anger the way you do when you do something stupid and hurt yourself entirely through your own stupidity. I plain old bokked all over the place, forgot that I had to hide, forgot everything I'd been thinking of, and just gave myself over to my rage. I released the skis, pushed up, wiped the nasty mix of snow, mud, and pine needles from my face, angrily hurled the pack to the snow, and screamed "Fuck!" several times, jumping up and down in a rage, not caring if anyone heard me, or if I was visible to an overhead satellite, or much of anything except about the way my whole body was clenched like a fist and my back and head hurt. I hadn't done anything like that in twenty-five years or more.

  Long practice will have its way; in the middle of it all, I said, out loud, very calmly, "Let overwrite, let override." Instantly I felt better.

  With all the canned goods in the cache, even having gotten the job done a little early, I had plenty of time to take the long scenic route home, but I just knew I had forgotten something, so after a few hundred yards I turned around and went back to take a look and see if I could figure out what was bothering me.

  Everything was right where it should be, so it wasn't that I had forgotten any physical objects. Had I forgotten some part of the careful system we used to keep everything hidden? I looked around the cache to see if anything was wrong with the concealment, but everything was fine there. Then I looked to see if I'd left any track or trace I should cover.

  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 fe
el 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.