Candle Read online

  I fell out of Kelly’s mind for a second, and everything froze into a still picture. Below the image of the man, One True inscribed a positive identification of Lobo, from voiceprint and DNA. A moment later it added that according to information and samples recovered later, the disease he was suffering from seemed to be a strain of measles, aggravated by mutAIDS. Both diseases were supposed to be extinct, but Earth’s a big planet and you never know what might yet be festering in its untended corners.

  Then—I had just an instant to wish this wasn’t necessary—One True commanded, and my Resuna dropped me back into Kelly’s memories.

  As Kelly, I watched Mom put her hand into the medical synthesizer, and the man stood close to her and pressed a bare shoulder against the sampler. Then he spoke some codes aloud; in the old days communication between people and machines hadn’t been perfect, and whoever this man was, he still knew how to use the old accesses that had been there, for example, so that parents could get medicine for their babies.

  The man winced briefly as it gave him a pressure injection, but when that was done he sighed with relief.

  He ate practically all the ready food in the house, and reconstituted three meals, each of which was supposed to be for four people, and gobbled those down as well, along with more coffee than you’d have thought could go into a human being. He seemed fascinated with our reconstitutor; with a faraway look, he calculated for a few seconds, and finally decided to take it with him, along with almost all the food in the house. “The rescue crews will bring you more,” he assured us, but I didn’t believe him. I still wanted Resuna worse than I had ever wanted anything.

  When he had finished eating, he said, “There’s one more thing I need. I’m very much from the old days, I spent a long time as a mercenary during the War of the Memes, and you know what that means. You and your daughter have cooperated just beautifully, and been very helpful, but there’s something I want to do to both of you, which you are not going to like. I hope you’ll do your best to cooperate so it isn’t any more painful than it has to be.”

  Mom was starting to cry, and I was afraid about what was going to happen.

  The man said, “Resuna is supposed to be able to erase everything, afterwards.”

  Mom shook her head. “It doesn’t really work that way. I still have lim too many memories, from the old days, and they still hurt me every day.”

  The man nodded, several times, as if he were thinking carefully about that. “You know, part of me is very sorry to hear that. Another part of me is real happy to know that this is going to be in your head forever.”

  Mom was crying really hard now, and that was so frightening that I started to cry too. The man grabbed us both by our arms and took us down to Mom’s bedroom; he told us to take our clothes off, and left the room. Mom said we had to do what he said, so we did. I was cold and felt really strange about being naked.

  A moment later he came back, with a tube of skin lotion from Mom’s bathroom. He undressed, and told us where to put the lotion; it felt weird and icky. He had me watch while he did things to Mom, and then made her watch while he did the same things to me.

  Then he got dressed. We were both crying. Mom was throwing up. It looked like he was crying too.

  He grabbed up his pack of looted food, and the reconstitutor, and said, “Hey, I’m the last of my kind. I’m not going to ever come back. And it was nothing personal. Both of you were just here. Like getting hit by lightning, you know.”

  He went back through the shattered door, and out into the snow; when he turned and saw us staring at him, he yelled, “Get back upstairs out of the cold! And make sure the alarm is thrown!”

  We did what he said. When we checked, the alarm was already going off. It was only maybe half an hour until the rescue crews got there in the disksters, and gave us new copies of Resuna, and took us to the hospital.

  My new copy of Resuna is very kind and patient, like they’re supposed to be, and supposedly I won’t have big problems later, because all the bad things were dealt with so soon after they happened, and because Resuna is always there helping me. Sometimes One True itself checks in to see if I’m all right. Eventually, in a year or two, what happened will just make me sad, now and then, and maybe not very often if things go the way the doctors are hoping they will. I know it will work out, because Resuna says it will, and how can you do anything but trust Resuna?

  All the same, the copy of Resuna that tells me things and comforts me is the new copy that the rescue crew put in, and I still miss my old Resuna. The new one doesn’t know me as well as the one that had lived in my head since I was a little kid. I know that it will get better, but I miss my old one.

  <> I fell backwards out of Kelly’s mind. I was back in my comfortable chair at the table in the library; the hole in the table closed up, contracted into the folder, and became a dot no bigger than a period. I could go back there, if for some reason I ever wanted to.

  I didn’t want to. I could feel the picture of what he’d done to that mother and little girl building up inside me, a thing to be avenged and taken out on him, like the destruction of my crew a decade ago, like the deaths of Tammy and Carrie during the war, like all the good friends I had lost too young, like all the evil that the cowboys and their spiritual ancestors had worked in the world.

  I had not felt such a passion for a hunt in many years; maybe I had never felt it before at all. The anger hurt, physically, in my chest, but I knew Resuna needed me to be that angry, and I accepted the pain.

  I opened another file folder, from the still-tall stack of them to my left. There was more, but there wasn’t worse, and I was grateful for that, at least. I seemed to be there for hours reading all the accounts of what he’d done since his reappearance a few months previously. In those visions you have perfect concentration, and time passes much faster than it does in the outside world—but it still takes a while to digest such a catalog of human evil, perverse cruelty, and solid constant nastiness. By the time I had finished my reading, I was feeling tired and sick, and felt like I’d used up a full day’s energy right there in the “library,” even though my copy of Resuna told me that I had only been in the vision for six minutes and fourteen seconds.

  <> I sat back on my couch, talking to One True consciously now, no longer in the dream. “Sort of flattering,” I said. “There’re at least five other hunters you could’ve picked who could’ve done the job. You could even’ve sent a whole posse of us. Why me?”

  I was surrounded by warm, friendly laughter. One True was playing my auditory nerves a quad sound system. “Why ‘why’?” it asked. “We don’t understand your reason for wanting to know our reasons, and your copy of Resuna doesn’t seem to understand either. Are you fishing for a compliment? Are you seeking clarification? Are you—”

  “It was the first thought that happened to pop into my head,” I said. “You have five other reserve hunters for the Rockies. They’re all very good too. I was just wondering why One True picked me.”

  “Because we had to pick somebody,” One True said. “So we picked the best one. Or at least the one with the best record. Do you think someone else could do it better?”

  I thought about that. Resuna helpfully pulled up the records of the other five, and I compared those with my memories of them. They were all very good, but I had to agree that if we were just sending one, it probably ought to be me. “No, I guess there’s not.”

  “Well, then, we’ll send you. And just you—because our guess is that since one hunter will make less noise and attract less attention than six, we should just send the best one after him. This Lobo is apt to be crafty and easily spooked.”

  Outside, the very first hints of false dawn were starting to color the distant peaks on their east-facing sides; their west sides still shone brighter in the cold light of the full moon. It looked like a million degrees below zero out there, and I shivered despite the warmth in the room.

  “Remember that excessive curiosity and doub
t can damage your copy of Resuna,” One True reminded me. “And because yours is such a veteran copy, it is to the benefit of all of us for it to stay in good shape. There’s a lot of memory that the world needs in your head, Currie. Don’t start arguing and questioning; all you’ll do is hurt us all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We know,” One True said. “Your copy of Resuna just relayed the feeling.”

  I felt better. The mind of the whole planet understood that my feelings were sincere and my intentions were good. We didn’t need to talk about much else—all the arrangements had been there in the dream—and so I took a last look at the cold landscape outside and asked aloud, “Bob, temperature of this room?”

  “Seventy-three,” it answered, defaulting to Fahrenheit. “Usually you feel warmer if I bring up lights. Would you like a warm glow, heavy on red and yellow, here and in the kitchen? Your sweet rolls will be ready in about two more minutes.”

  “Do it,” I said. The room was suddenly bathed in yellows, reds, and oranges, flickering as if there were fireplaces on all the walls. “Looks like we’ll be back on work schedule until further notice. Do you still have a copy of it?”

  “Last time on work schedule was January 19, Year 14, or 2076 Old Dating,” Bob responded, “and the copy appears to be undamaged. Per that work schedule, shall I put on a full breakfast in addition to the sweet rolls?”

  “Do it, Bob.” I went out to the kitchen, dumped my cold coffee, and poured myself some fresh. Strange to be having such a morning—I had thought I’d never have another one.

  I took my sweet rolls out to the little table by the main window in the big room, facing the grand view down the canyon to Sursumcorda, and ate greedily, washing the sticky sweet gooey rolls down with gulps of searing hot coffee. At least for the duration, no more worrying about calories, except maybe for worrying about getting enough. Resuna mentioned to me that my blood pressure and pulse were up and I was using more oxygen, and asked if I wanted an adjustment. I told it hell no. This was just what it was to feel really alive after so long in retirement.

  I reviewed my newly acquired memories to make them conscious. When I had hunted Lobo, he had been the leader of a gang of eleven cowboys, a huge number for those last years of hunting. His gang had pulled off several sizable raids on small towns and isolated work stations, making Lobo a throwback even then. The gangs of cowboys had been rounded up and turned first, mostly before Year 5. It’s much easier to catch a gang because it’s harder to hide in groups, and usually all we had to do was catch and turn one of them to get enough information to find all the rest. By the time we were given the mission of hunting Lobo’s gang, everyone else that the team had been hunting for at least three years had been loners.

  Lobo had survived to become the last lone cowboy himself. The rest of his gang was long since captured and turned, so far as I knew—though if he could survive so many years without One True spotting him, who knew what else he might be managing? This was going to be the greatest hunt of my career; I felt that in my old bones already.

  The sun was up far enough now to turn the sky blue, put a bright shine on the distant snow-spattered top of Mount Teocalli, and bring out the color of its distinctive striations, so that it stood like an island of light and color above a sea of dull slate-darkness. In the old days I had loved this time of morning, and once I thought that, Resuna copied the memories forward, and I loved it again.

  It had been a long time since I’d hunted a cowboy. I had been a mercenary soldier in the War of the Memes before I’d been a cowboy hunter, and before that I’d been a kid. When I thought of those things it always seemed so far away.

  Since retirement, I had led a pleasant life of old-man pleasures—the greenhouse, the library, occasional carpentry, plenty of outdoor sports, almost always with Mary scant meters away. It was rich, fulfilling, well-earned, everything I deserved for my years of danger and hardship in One True’s service—but it wasn’t what I had been forged out of anger and love to do.

  I thanked One True, in my heart, again, so that Resuna would pick it up and relay it. First I thanked One True for selecting me and giving me the chance to live fully one more time, hunting Lobo. Then I thanked One True for making a world where people like Lobo would be stopped before they destroyed everything, where the pain and horror they inflicted had a limit. Finally I thanked One True in advance, knowing that when Lobo was caught and turned, and I was menaced once again by the melancholy pain of being a cowboy hunter in a world without cowboys, Resuna would be able to soothe my soul and return me to the warm, mellow, soft life of my retirement here; I would never really have to feel my painful loss of usefulness.

  Bob announced that the full breakfast was ready. Resuna was already tinkering with my physiology: I was ravenous, though as yet I’d done nothing strenuous. No doubt in a short while I’d be glad for all the calories I could ram in.

  I had stayed more or less in shape. Skills should be okay as well. The whole time I had worked as a cowboy hunter, my copy of Resuna had been uploading those to One True and downloading other hunters’ skills to me. If anything had atrophied or been forgotten, Resuna would call up One True’s libraries, find it, and get me a fresh copy, and muscle memory is long-lived anyway. As I finished a second plate of eggs, home fries, and baked beans, I had little moments and flashbacks—instants when I visualized making a couple of tight turns to descend a steep hillside in the back country, or daydreamed of checking the ice on a not-frozen-enough river, or remembered creeping forward, belly down in gray slush, around a rock with my tranquilizer gun for a clear shot at the bare buttocks of a cowboy taking a dump in the bushes. All the old systems were waking up.

  Besides my own skills, I would also be able to draw on the most recent copy of every skill of everyone who had ever been good at this business. On the other hand, I was still up against the unknown. No cowboy until Lobo had ever hidden out for so long completely undetected.

  “All the same, it looks doable to me,” I said, aloud, knowing that my copy of Resuna would hear me and pass it on to One True. “Looking forward to it.”

  I finished breakfast and carried the dishes to the regenner to be melted, purified, and reformed. The view over the snow-covered boulders up the hill from the kitchen window—not as spectacular as the view on the other side, out over the town and valley, but in its quiet way, something that had also grown into me—seemed to remind me how much One True valued me. Or rather, the old part of me (which had lived for decades, full grown, before Resuna turned most of humanity) always insisted on thinking of the view, and the A-Frame itself, and the many comforts Mary and I had in our retirement, as rewards for the years I had spent in the woods, tracking the last outlaws on Earth. But the part of me that knew and understood the world through Resuna knew something that was so much better; I had been preserved because in One True’s estimation I had been one of the six best cowboy hunters in the Rockies, and therefore One True had created a life for me that would let me stay in shape and maintain my basic capabilities, against any future need.

  I knew One True was sending these memories and feelings into me because of the question I had asked earlier, and I felt both how absurd it was that I needed it, and how willing One True was to look after my need anyway. After all, what was there to be reassured about? It was just realistic to know that I had been the best and been preserved for that reason.

  In the old days, before the memes, there were things they called “pre-memes” now, in retrospect—little partial routines and programs that were shared by many people; I’d had my share like anyone else. One of them called “modesty” would have been ashamed at my saying baldly that I was the best, no matter how true it might be. Another one called “self-esteem” would have been pleased whether it was true or not.

  In the sort of minds people had before Resuna, modesty and self-esteem would have fought it out, wasting great quantities of energy and effort in my mind as they struggled with each other, paralyzing
me from many effective actions, creating a dangerous propensity for overestimating or underestimating my own capabilities, misleading me into foolish diversionary actions in the attempt to satisfy them both. Most pre-memes were quite capable of clouding a person’s judgment, and replicated by strategies that were anti-survival for the larger mind or person.

  The man I was going to be hunting probably still had dozens or hundreds of pre-memes—pride, rights, honor, self-reliance, and vengeance, just about for sure, since almost all cowboys we had ever captured and turned had been running those at the time of capture. He might even have some of the more complex, thought-to-be-extinct pre-memes, like Ecucatholicism, cybertao, or America, or even the really exotic ones like communism or fundamentalism. That was why it was vital to take him alive; though he was a deadly enemy to One True and therefore to the whole human race, he was also a repository of memetic material that might be analyzed so that useful parts could be incorporated into everyone’s copy of Resuna, and defenses could be built against the bad parts—if Lobo could be turned and the old pre-memes extracted and copied from him.

  So it was no surprise that One True, which rarely made mistakes and never abided in them, had had a superb cowboy hunter like me available, right here in the Colorado Rockies, just when the need had arisen. One True thought farther ahead than any mere person could do, and it shaped us to ends that were good for us, good for the poor old mauled Earth, good for itself. I was the product of its foresight, which is why I could enjoy being One True’s superb tool.

  In the same way, One True pointed out to me, a Cajun hunter still lived on a houseboat in Simmesport, and a bush-hippie hunter was waiting in reserve in a hand-built cabin in Homer.

  Not having thought about either place in decades, I was startled at what poured back into my memory. When I had been born, the Mississippi had still flowed into the Gulf in Plaquemines Parish, eighty miles south of New Orleans—far east of where it did now—and most of Alaska had not been under the glaciers. Thanks to One True, nobody would ever come out of the backwoods to disturb the peace of Earth again, and there would be time enough now fix everything, now that all of humanity on Earth truly worked together. We hunters had done our small bit to make that happen, and like every other hunter, I thanked One True for having given us the opportunity.