Candle

by John Barnes

  I was a little mollified that he was at least thinking, perhaps, that he owed me some explanation. I let it go for another couple bucketloads. We had now put a hole in the floor, mostly around the exit hole, perhaps a meter across and half a meter deep.

  As he came back and poured his cook pot full of hot mud into the water, and watched it swirl down, he said, "We ought to at least dig down to some rock by day's end and get that hole pritnear as wide as it'll easily go. Okay, Currie, here's my story. Final version. All the truth as far as I know it. And I was probably wrong to keep it from you, once it was clear you'd come around to my side."

  For the rest of that morning, we loaded buckets and sent mud down that hole, and every so often he'd tell me more of his story, as we watched for any sign that we had to stop dumping the mud. As I'd guessed, there was room enough for all the mud to go down there, so far—our probes, and some shouting down there for echoes, made me think that the chamber below was mostly empty and probably twenty feet high and a hundred long. Of course, if the mud dammed up the exit to that chamber, then it would start to fill and we could be dealing with a nuisance, but when we got this hole wide enough open, we should be able to see whether or not that was likely to happen. Meanwhile there was surely room enough for the mud from this early part of the job.

  Between the heavy work and the heat from the spring, we were both sweaty and grimy when we stopped for a quick lunch of some jerky and hard rolls, washed down with yet more iron coffee.

  We both took a few muscle relaxants before starting again, and that got the story flowing better because the relaxants hit like mild, long-lasting alcohol. During that "whole afternoon, off and on, a few sentences at a time as we'd pass each other, dumping mud and shoveling the buckets, I heard the rest of Dave's story, and we finished it over hot soup and fresh bread that we were able to fix by using up one precious chemical heater; we felt like we both needed it badly. By that time we had a hole big enough for us to stand in together, almost a meter and a half deep, and a good two meters across. The opening in the floor turned out to be a round hole, perhaps a foot across, that seemed to lead down into a much bigger open space. The odor coming up out of there was slightly musty, but not bad; probably it had no direct outlet to the outside world.

  "Anyway," I said, "we can accelerate the whole process, because there's obviously much more room down there than there is clay up here, and it will be a while before we start opening that area up for ourselves. Give it a week and we'll be done excavating, even counting the time to go move another cache or two here. I'm not sure where we'll salvage or steal the plumbing to put in a real hot-water-and-heat system, but we'll come up with something, anyway."

  "God, you're better at this than I ever would hope to be," Dave said, sighing.

  "Considering what you did get through, you can hold your head up in any company you want," I assured him.

  We each had a little snort to help us sleep. Between the night's booze and the day's exercise, my sleeping bag on a clay floor in a steamy cave felt like a heated waterbed with a down comforter in a high-priced hotel. I watched the star through the hole for just a few seconds, and then fell asleep. That night I dreamed, over and over, of the story that Dave had told me.

  I got a great rest and woke up only somewhat sore, but the dreams of that night were with me for a long time after, and for the next day—very much like the previous one in the work we did—I kept thinking of other questions to ask him, and other ways to try to make his story hang together in my brain, in a way that wouldn't disturb me quite so much. By the end of that second day I had the whole thing, pritnear as clear as it would ever get, and by then I had about arrived at the decision that there wasn't a thing to do, for me or for anyone on Earth, that wouldn't be a huge mistake. Then Dave pointed out the last part to me, which I'd missed, and I went and made that huge mistake, all on my own.

  <> Dave Singleton's name derived from something strange that had happened in the Foundling's Entrance at Denver Dome's municipal orphanage in 2043.

  During the Gray Decade, probably a quarter of the babies born became foundlings, as city after city ran out of money and shut down the Dole, and with it the Dolework that had at least allowed families to stay together, and single mothers to afford child care and support a family. Many people just could not afford to keep the babies they had. Because of that, most orphanages and hospitals had a "Foundling's Entrance," a warm, sheltered, discreet foyer, with an entrance where it was easy to come and go unobserved, which was a safe place to leave off a baby anonymously. Usually it was set up with a counter, but no one at the counter; instead, a large hand-scrawled sign said, "Back in 3 minutes." This allowed people who just wanted to set the baby down and run to do so; an AI watched through a hidden camera, and when it saw a baby drop-off in progress, it would sound an alarm at a desk in the staff quarters, so that a human being could decide what to do. Sometimes that meant hurrying there to be "just arriving back," and sometimes it meant staying out of sight until the person was gone and the baby had been left.

  Two days before Dave had been dropped off there, a girl who didn't look much more than thirteen had come in with two-week-old twin boys, one in an ancient car seat and the other in a cardboard box, and stood waiting patiently at the counter till an attendant came out. She had emphatically insisted at the counter that since her boyfriend, Dave, had been killed, both twins would have to be named Dave, and that was the only way she was giving them up.

  "Maybe they should have a different middle name or last name, so people won't mix them up?" the attendant suggested, hoping that she would see the reasonableness of this.

  "I already thought of that," the girl said. "I never knew my boyfriend's last name, anyway. He had this Um important job where he wasn't allowed to date or see girls or nothing. It was like national security or something like that. He told me some stuff about it that I can't tell anyone else. Anyway, since it all had to be secret, I never knew his last name, but since he got, you know, shot and I saw him die, pos-def I wanted to give his babies the names I called him. So they both have to be Dave, but here's the middle and last names." She pulled a note from her shirt pocket, unfolded it, and handed it across the counter. "The one on the right is Bear. 'Kay? I have to go. The Salvation Army where I'm staying doesn't feed us if we're late, and I want to get my last meal because now that I gave up the kids they'll throw me out tomorrow." She left in a cloud of other half-explanations.

  The attendant had handled messier cases, and she shrugged. She looked at the sheet of paper and turned to the twin to her left—figuring the girl had meant the one to her own right—and said, "Well, I guess you're Dave Bear. And you must be Dave Love," she added to the other twin. "Welcome to Denver Dome Orphanage."

  Within an hour they were known to everyone in the place as the Dave Twins. The signs on their incubators read "David M. Love" and "David P. Bear," but it's natural for people to gossip, and gossip reaches everyone in an institution eventually, even the children, so the Dave Twins endured years of being teased about their middle names, "My" and "Pooh."

  Two days later, another baby turned up, dropped off by a different but also very young girl. This one was in a cardboard box with a couple of stuffed toys and a blanket, plus a note that said, "Call him anything as long as it's Dave. That was his father's name. You can tell him his father is a spy or a cop or something, and he must have gone undercover because he never came back to marry me."

  "I even looked like I should have been the third Dave Twin," Dave said, as we squatted at lunch the first day, "which makes me kinda suspect that the original Dave got around plenty."

  Since the first two were the Dave Twins, some wit on the staff suggested this one should be the Dave Singleton.

  The Denver Dome orphanage was small and poor; Denver had never really recovered from the fires that had raged through it in the last part of the Eurowar, and the new dome there didn't cover much more than the old downtown. It was still an important crossroads and a
good place for a warehouse, but since hardly any human beings were needed to staff warehouses anymore, most of the old city remained untenanted, infested with a few vags and packs of stray dogs, for many decades before the dome finally was nuked in 2059. Clamped savagely between a vanished tax base and a large number of the poor, Denver Dome had nothing to spare for its orphanage. From what I remembered of Denver Dome, the few times I had been through there before it was nuked, it was a cold, poor, mean town in spirit anyway, one that didn't mind the sight of misery much, so I doubt it broke their hearts not to have anything to spend on their poor.

  In 2049, with the war breaking out, and every social problem worsening, the Denver Dome Council was looking hard for a way, any old way, to shut down the orphanage for good and thereby cut expenses. It didn't take them long to hit on the same solution that lots of places did: they made the children available to everyone who wanted them. Even in its early years, the War of Papal Succession was a war for control of human brains, most especially the brains of the next generation; one way to get brains was to more or less buy them while they were still enclosed in children. The market for kids was brisk.

  Boys twelve and up went off to militias and mercenary companies; girls were sold to affluent families as servants, if they were lucky, and to barely disguised pimps if they were not; younger children went off to be adopted by families, schools, sects, and creches so that they could all be indoctrinated by all the various splinters off of Ecucatholicism and cybertao.

  When Phil and Monica Comasus came by the orphanage, one nice sunny Monday morning in February, 2050, they said they wanted to take three kids with them, and offered to pay in NihonAmerica bearer bonds, which were still being honored because the transfer ships were the collateral. Nobody at the orphanage asked any questions; most of the staff didn't care, and the few who did, didn't want to know whether the kids were going to be adopted, or slaves, or used in medical experiments. Their job, as defined by the city, was to get what money they could for handing over kids.

  They were trying to do it in a hurry, because, however bad the other options might be, it was clear this orphanage wouldn't be in business much longer, with Denver leaning toward bankruptcy and the rest of the world going to hell. The first serious shots of the War of Papal Succession were just being fired, the rubble of Rome wasn't cool yet, and armies big enough to have real battles were only just being organized and trained.

  Phil Comasus was a short man—almost tiny. He was shorter than his wife, Monica, who was only of average height. They made an odd couple, to seven-year-old Dave's eyes, because they contrasted in so many ways. Phil might have been fifteen years older than Monica. He was plump and soft-bodied; she was slender, angular, and well-muscled. She had thick black hair, high cheekbones, blue eyes, and the kind of patrician good looks that Hollywood used to insist on for its "serious" actresses; he had bumpy, squashed features that made him look like one of the Seven Dwarves, an effect accentuated by his perpetually untidy slush-gray goatee. Both were quietly but expensively dressed, a few social notches above the Doleworkers who ran the orphanage. "They were a fairy-tale couple," Dave said to me, as we stopped for sandwiches and some iron coffee, "except in most fairy tales, the troll doesn't marry the princess."

  Dave said he realized, even at age seven, that things were going to be different from now on, not when they told him that he would be leaving with this couple within half an hour, and not when he packed up his things, or when the whole orphanage lined up to say good-bye to him, Cecile, and Robin. The moment when he knew everything would be different was after they went into the diskster, Monica showed them how to strap in, and she said, "Now—do you have absolutely everything you should? Is there anything you want or need that you forgot to pick up? They rushed you out of there, and I don't want to leave anything behind if it's yours and it's your favorite."

  Dave had three sets of clothes, a tiny stuffed bear that had been a present from Mrs. Allen before she got laid off, and a bag of toiletries. He didn't really care about all the crayon drawings in his locker, and the crayons were the property of the orphanage—they were always telling him not to use so many.

  Cecile, a quiet, small, dark-haired girl of five, also had nothing else. But ten-year-old Robin, a husky and muscular Asian girl who was one of the leaders of kid society, spoke up and said, "I can't remember if I packed a picture of my real mother. It's the only one I have."

  "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.