Candle

by John Barnes

  "After he came to, and figured out what was up, he realized that the Organization must think he was dead, and from then on he did his best to make sure they continued to think so. But when the cutting's done and the pieces are laid, you know, nothing really stops people like the Organization. A long time after that, they found out who he was and where he was, and killed him and Monica. That's later in the story."

  "You're sure it was this Organization and not just someone at random? I thought you said it was soldiers from Murphy's."

  "There might have been no connection," Dave said, "except a long time later—well, maybe just a few years, it might have been around Year Three, when I was putting together my group of cowboys—I met up with this one cowboy, guy who called himself Gregor, who wanted to join. He said he'd been in Murphy's Comsat Avengers. Gregor was a loner, and it didn't take too long to figure out that his reason for hiding out was not a love of freedom or some principle. He'd have been hiding from any society, because, at least in my estimation, the guy was either a serial killer already, or he was going to be. I turned him down. Then a couple of months later, me and two of my cowboys came across Gregor in a deserted small town, where he'd found a family hiding out in an old grocery store, and was 'using them up,' which was his expression for spending a few days doing godawful things while he killed them off one at a time. He had just killed the father when we got there. Well, you know, justice is rough out here in the woods, so me and my cowboys gave him a real thorough beating to help him tell us the truth, because we wanted to know whether the man had any accomplices, and just what the hell he intended by committing the sort of crime that endangered every person who was still living free.

  "Somewhere in the course of the beating, just about the point where he was about to break, I guess, and grasping at anything to make himself hold on, Gregor told us that he belonged to the Organization, and that we had better let him go if he knew what was good for us, because the Organization always avenged its own.

  "After that, I just kept kicking him till he passed out, put a small demolition charge under his chin, taped his head down, and set off the charge. Made a hell of a mess but I was pretty pissed off and I guess I rationalized it by figuring it would make an example of him for any others there might be around, and if he really was with the Organization, it would get them after me—which was fine with me, I'd love to have more of them show up. More chances for revenge for Phil and Monica, you know," he said. "Anyway, this guy Gregor was a monster. When I die I'm going to have two big regrets about life, and they're both going to be about getting somewhere too late. One of them's not coming across that cowboy before he'd killed the father and one of the children in that family; in a better world, I guess I'd have come across him during the war, and shot his damned head off before he ever got loose among the cowboys."

  "And your other big regret?" I asked, keeping the story rolling, I hoped, giving us both an excuse to not dig more clay just immediately.

  "I'm getting to that one. Another sandwich?"

  "Yeah." I accepted it gratefully, and he got on with that part of the story.

  <> For most of the 2050s, while the War of Papal Succession became the War of the Memes and became steadily nastier, Dave had the best years of his life. Those years while he was growing up were a busy, demanding, challenging time, but a very happy one. The war went on and the glaciers grew; Antarctica lost its ice and Scotland disappeared under an ice sheet; memes were created, mutated, grew, got control of a large part of the human race; guys a few years older than Dave, like me, spent the decades fleeing or pursuing, ducking or shooting back. The world got uglier and nastier, the memes that had begun as weapons took over the war for their own purposes, and life in the Big House went on.

  Dave got his growth early, and was big for sixteen. The other kids had been quietly vanishing as they got to about that age, so it came as no surprise to Dave, Prester, and Joey when Phil called them in and told them what their part in things would be; by that time, the only time they saw the older ones was when one of them would come back for a brief few days to rest, recover, and get another outside mission from Phil and Monica.

  "My last disciples," Phil said, grinning. "At least for a while, until we're in whatever the next historical period turns out to be, and I figure out what else the world might need. Has anyone who's gone on an outside mission ever told you what they do out there?"

  The three boys shook their heads, and Phil smiled. "Well, I guess it wasn't really secret, but they probably get a habit of being very discreet out there, and it's probably good that they have the habit. All right, here's the story; here's why I grabbed you out of those orphanages and put you through CSL education at a time when I'd rather have been spending my time sensibly hiding with Monica, waiting to get old and die."

  "You're not going to die," Prester blurted out.

  "Oh, sooner or later," Phil said, "but only on one day out of all of the billions of years of time. That should tell you how negligible the "whole business is. Sooner or later the Organization will find out that I'm alive and where I am, or I'll get sick with something that requires DNA validation to treat, which I don't dare do since it would be like publishing my fingerprints, or I'll just fall downstairs and whack my head on the balustrade. Not today, probably, and I expect to be here when you all come back to visit. But I'm afraid the visits won't be often, for a while, because these next few years we're going to be very busy."

  Phil explained a little of what the others were up to; all were in some covert role, some in very deep cover, which was why they hadn't been seen since they'd left. "Who got what job depended mostly on my guess as to how well they'd handle the loneliness," Phil said. Five of the former students were working their way up one hierarchy or another, becoming important in military, financial, or church positions; four were out making "adjustments." That was what Cecile and Julie had departed to do, just a few months before, their youth carefully concealed by makeup and padding. "I wish we'd had more time to prep them," Phil said, "and to let them have time to grow adult bodies, but adjustments kept getting more urgent, and they were the only ones left to send, since I had to reserve you three for a special mission."

  "What do they adjust?" Dave asked, trying to avoid, for the moment, the awareness that there was a special mission for him.

  Phil sighed. "When possible, they just do things to cause good people to be promoted, and bad people discredited. They tinker here and there to try to help the war run out of gas, which it's going to do in three to four years at most—and we need it to end in a stalemate, between at least five memes, not in a single-meme victory. They meddle in the affairs of different organizations, sending some of them down paths where they'll do more good for humanity, helping the good ones along ... every now and then seeing that a bad one breaks up or collapses. Just now, for example, Julie is working a staff job for the army of Real America, up north in Minot, helping them recover their balance and morale so that they can retake Minnesota and roll back One True; down south in Tennessee, Isaac is getting Free American through a minor palace putsch that ought to put an end to their concentration camps and secret police. Sometimes it's a matter of infiltrating and making a few changes or helping someone who's going to make the changes. A lot turns on small differences."

  He sighed. "And I guess I really can't conceal from you that every so often they're killing some of the people that are most in the way of progress and success for humanity. Usually very discreetly—with so many mutant and tailored bugs around, sudden fatal infections just aren't that unusual. Every so often they set up something more public, when that's what will do us the most good, but that always makes me nervous, because you never know where an investigation might lead, and one intervention that just never works is to kill a smart cop or prosecutor who's starting to think that things are more than they seem. So we do less of the messy stuff than you might imagine, and I'm glad of that.

  "But you three are in for something very different." Phil
looked out the window for a long moment, at the green hills and the forest that came most of the way up to the lawn of the Big House. "The good news is you'll be able to come back here and visit more often than your fellow students. The bad news is that I'm giving you three the toughest job of all."

  Dave sat quietly with the others and waited. He had guessed already that this was going to be something to do with the memes; Phil had admitted, several times, that although he'd been perfectly accurate in predicting the beginning of the War of Papal Succession and the deterioration of the Earth as the war wound down to approximating Hobbes's "war of each against all," he hadn't foreseen anything like the memes at all.

  "Theoretically I only needed ten people," he said, "to make all the requisite changes, and exert the force that would keep the world out of some of its worst possible tracks. But—well, here's where you have to give Monica the credit. She said we needed to have a reserve against the unexpected. So I chose to have three more. And here you are, ready to go. There's a job for you that I could never have guessed we'd need."

  Joey spoke up; shy and modest, he rarely spoke, but he usually asked an important question. "So out of the ten, there are five working their way into positions of power, and four of your 'adjusters.' That's nine. But you sent out ten."

  Phil looked miserably sad; it seemed to put a decade onto him, right there. "It's probably revealing that I told myself, three times, to be sure I told you what had happened to Martha. And I still haven't yet. She was an exec assistant for the Pacific Rewildernization Corporation on the Big Island, in Hawaii, where they're trying to get some kind of a normal ecology going again; it was a place where we had some hope of getting many really smart people, and their kids, away from the violence, out from between the contesting powers, in sort of an independent republic that would grow naturally out of the settlements of ecological reconstruction specialists. One of the things she was working on was getting them to adopt CSL education—we've never had much luck getting people to do that on Earth, because unless it's really an emergency, people really do not want their children to be a great deal smarter, better adjusted, and more competent than they are—even with that carefully planned society in space, the parental generation totally flipped out when they realized just how obsolete they had made themselves, and if they hadn't been so thoroughly trained and conditioned to accept it, we might have lost the ships to the power struggle between the generations. Down here, with uncontrolled populations, you might provoke massacres of the children, or god knows what else. So the idea was that on the island, we'd have a bunch of smart capable people that we could propagandize into accepting CSL education for their kids, who would let it go on, and we'd finally have at least one really functional society here on Earth."

  "What happened to Martha?" Dave asked quietly. He was remembering her laugh, and the way she could run, and thinking of the pictures she had painted that now hung in the front hall; a tall, handsome black girl, with an amazing gift for languages, always willing to help the younger kids; her one visit home, when they'd all had a picnic on the lawn to celebrate and she'd looked completely grown up.

  "Raped and shot dead," Phil said. "Then mutilated in some grotesque ways we don't need to talk about. Her body was left on her boss's desk, and any hope of getting CSL education for Hawaii seems to have died with her. My best guess is that she came to the attention of the Organization. (I have long suspected that they're doing what we're doing, but in reverse.) She must have distinguished herself enough to be noticed—that's why I keep telling people to be good only at the parts of their job that affect larger matters. A patina of ordinary incompetence is probably their best protection." He was quiet for a long time, and so were the three boys.

  "Well," Phil said, "it's a bad idea to dwell on everything bad that can happen, as we all know. Let me tell you what I have in mind for the three of you. It will be dangerous and difficult enough; you needn't fear that any of you will be getting a soft ride while others run risks and face difficulties."

  It was only years later that Dave realized how odd it was that Phil assumed that neither he nor Joey nor Prester would have wanted a soft ride.

  Phil looked from one to the other and said, "In some ways, it may be I'm asking you to face the biggest fear anyone in the group might have to face. I'm going to ask you all to let me infect you with a meme."

  Dave's gut rolled over; he'd had no direct acquaintance with memes, but he knew more than enough about them.

  "If it will make you feel better," Phil added, gently, "Monica and I have both been running that meme for four months now, and we can assure you that we're in charge, not it. The meme is called Freecyber, and Monica developed it from my concepts."

  "What's it do?" Prester asked. "I mean, obviously it either didn't take you over, or if it did, it's got you copied perfectly."

  "Well, I hope it didn't take me over," Phil said. "And what I run is three copies of Freecyber, all of them interacting. What Freecyber is, is an anti-meme meme. It lives in your brain and doesn't do much unless another meme invades. Then it goes into action and disables the other meme, and eventually builds up your ability to resist another infection. It preserves individuality, if you will. And what I want you guys to do is spread it everywhere—through the territory of every existing meme."

  They had to prepare a set of false IDs, and some introductions to places where the three boys could get hired to do computer jocking, and that took the better part of the afternoon, before they were ready to have their last big meal with Phil and Monica and go to bed early so that they could slip away with a few hours of dark left to them. Within weeks, Freecybers were a new enemy all over the globe; virtually every established meme was trying to hunt them down, copy code from them, and find some way to cope with the new competitor.

  <> "Well," I Said, as we took turns smashing the hole in the inner chamber open winder, sledges battering at the now-washed-clean rock, "at least that explains where Freecybers came from and why they had so many variations so fast. But—I hope it doesn't offend you to hear me say this—I always had the impression that the Freecybers talked a good game, but they seemed to be just as eager as any other meme to take you over."

  "That's a pritnear perfect description of what the problem was," Dave agreed, "and it's one that Phil and Monica never really got solved. The idea was supposed to be that Freecybers would allow people to have a much greater liberty in their personal lives and beliefs, but to do that, the Freecybers had to be smart enough to defeat other memes, and had to have a strong empathy for the desire for freedom—and you know, that combination meant that every generation Phil released, except the last one, always figured out that any freedom the host got was freedom the meme lost—and drew the implications—and became, basically, a sympathetic, patient tyrant. And since Phil was doing it all in ultracompact neurocoding, the Freecybers left people more in command of their abilities, able to exercise initiative, invent, create, do more than just cooperate and behave, and that meant that from the moment that a copy of any version of a Freecyber happened to think of the idea of having power over people, they were more effective competitors than most other memes out there. Then the other memes would gang up against them, and pirate the neurocode from the Freecybers ... and it would be another generation that failed, and Phil and Monica would have to create still another."

  For more than two years, Dave slipped in and out of roles and identities, moving around the world, sowing each new generation of Freecybers, every time in the hope that this one would be a liberator that did not degrade into a tyrant. Phil's original system of having three Freecybers watch each other in each brain running them had to be abandoned because it took up too much space; a system in which each Freecyber watched itself in a time-lagged system replaced it. But in each new generation, the Freecyber copies became corrupted and began to seek power and control for themselves—forcing Phil and Monica to develop a new generation of Freecybers that could take on and erase or control the last gen
eration of Freecybers.

  Phil and Monica worked endlessly on the problem, going short on sleep, worried by how the conflict as a whole was going, visibly aged by the strain every time Dave made it back to the Big House for a new set of memes and some badly needed rest and contemplation. The race was growing more intense as One True pulled ahead of other memes, and as the other memes allied to fight against One True. Freecybers, as a guerrilla insurrection against all sides, were finding it harder and harder to get in or do anything, in most regions, even when they were not corrupted. The risk of getting caught was growing.

  "And still I didn't see it coming," Dave said, as he methodically shoveled mud down the hole, the heavy loads splashing into some little pool the trickle of hot water must be making down there. The shadows from the lights up in the corners did strange things on his face; sometimes it looked like a very bitter smile, sometimes like a mask of tragedy, sometimes it was simply half there and staring madly. "I'd been working under all sorts of aliases as a mercenary, and wasn't too bad a soldier—good enough to fake it through most outfits, most of the time, as needed. The last batch of Freecybers, though, hadn't worked for crap against the new One True, and I'd barely gotten away with a whole uncaptured skin. So no matter what, we were in for a rough time."

  <> Weeks after it happened, one of the other kids from the Big House dropped Dave a note and let him know that One True had caught Prester and turned him; the date that was given was about right for it to be the explanation of how One True found out where the Big House was.

  Dave and Joey had been coming back in to pick up the new, improved version of Freecyber, and the diskster had dropped them off, as had been necessary for the past couple of years, a few miles from the Big House, in a grove of trees. That seemed to haunt Dave, years later—that if they had just once broken protocol, and come straight in on the diskster, they might have gotten there soon enough.