Candle

by John Barnes

  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 Re
suna 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.

  I climbed out of the sleeping bag; I had been sleeping in my thermies, and I was still uncomfortably warm after getting out of the bag. So I peeled out of the thermies, turned them inside out to air, got a small piece of soap from my jump bag, and managed sort of a sponge bath in the trickle at one end of the cave. It was better than nothing, but far from that hot tub.

  "You do realize that's also the coffee water?" Dave grumbled, dragging himself along. "And yes, I have some freeze-dried stuff, and a couple of cups. That's our beverage. And for the meal, today, sir, a can of tomatoes, a can of beans, and some powdered eggs, goes into a pot with hot water, glop fit for a king, and it's what there is anyway." He put two cups on a rock and poured a splash of freeze-dried coffee in each. "I could tell you something about that water, but you ought to find out for yourself."

  I took a cup and held it under the hot trickle, letting it fill up, and then tapped the cup a few times to make sure that the coffee powder had dissolved.

  One sip told me. "Iron," I said, running my tongue around my mouth to try to wipe some of the bitter astringent feel away.

  "No anemia for us," he agreed. "I'll finish yours if you don't want it."

  "It's caffeine," I said, "and I've had worse." I sat on a rock near enough the stream to be warm. "Should I unpack the stuff for breakfast?"

  "I'll get it in a minute; I'm gonna wash up. I know a trick or two for making iron water palatable."

  Still sipping my coffee, I wandered back around to the back of the cave and carefully took a leak right where the stream flowed back into the ground. If somebody soaking at a spa two hundred miles away had any problem with that, they could write me.

  When I got back, Dave had finished soaping and rinsing, and was dumping the ingredients into the pot. The water was two notches too hot to wash comfortably with, not quite hot enough to heat the food, and I made a mental note that we would need a cistern or something for the long run. (I doubted we were going to find a cool well up here, at least at any depth we had the equipment to reach.)

  Eggs, tomatoes, and beans aren't a bad mix, per se, and I've eaten worse, but on the other hand I've had better, and the water hadn't quite been hot enough to make the dried eggs fluff up. So it could have been a whole lot better, too. We gobbled it down, had another cup of iron coffee each, and then looked the situation over.

  "I'd suggest we work in just gloves, boots, and shorts," Dave said. "And since we never did get your screen box built, what do you have in mind for getting the dirt to wash down the stream?"

  "Let me try an experiment or two," I said. We got dressed as Dave had suggested, and went back into the chamber and put three long-life lights up high. With no opening to the surface, this room was almost up to room temperature anyway.

  "The trick is to make sure it mixes well," I pointed out. "Let's try the simplest possible way." I put five shovelfuls of dirt into one of our buckets, carried it b
ack to where the spring came in, let it fill with water—which made it a world heavier—stirred with the shovel, and poured it into the outlet. It went gurgling down without any sign of blocking or forming a dam. "It's not going to be as fast as a screen box would have been," I said. "But we have a bucket and a big cook pot. We can probably put one of each down the hole every ten minutes or so, allowing for breaks and meals and that kind of thing. We'll still get plenty of work done in a day, anyway. And whenever it gets tough or we get bored, we can sneak out and move a cache. I was thinking there are two that aren't so far away, and we might move them in a few days. Let's give it a month or so, though, before we pop up our heads in Dead Mule drainage; I have a feeling they'll be setting up an ambush there, and probably sitting in it for a good long while."

  "Makes sense," Dave said, nodding soberly. "And it does beat the whole process of hauling it out in packs."

  I turned and threw a couple shovelfuls into the bucket. "You know," I said, "after what I saw yesterday, and what I've figured out, I'd have to say that I don't believe you ever hauled even one pack of dirt out of that place."

  He tossed his second shovelful into the cook pot, walked out to the spring inlet, and came back sloshing it around. He poured it down the hole and finally said, "Well, you're wrong, there, Currie, though you're right that I didn't build the whole place. But I put the tub into the tub room, and I did build that library. And I hauled some dirt for those, because I never did think of doing things the way you came up with."

  I emptied two more buckets while I waited for him to come up with something else to say, but he didn't, so eventually I just asked him. "Uh, okay, do you mind if I ask if you're going to tell me what's going on?"

  "I've been trying to think of how to do just that," Dave said. "My problem is that I don't know exactly how to help you see what's going on, or why it matters, or anything, and it really seems like somehow I ought to be able to tell you all of it at once, and so there's no real one single place to start, and I get bogged down in trying to pick one. To understand one part, you need to understand three. Like that. But I'm not trying to hold out on you, not anymore, Currie. And I'd have told you eventually—it was just a question of when to tell you how much, because, well, you were real bound into One True and I wasn't sure which thing I might say might wake up your Resuna."