Century Next Door - Candle Part 2

The soft yellow glow came from panels on top of the shelter, and since the shelter walls were fully opaque and the light would go off if the door unsealed, I didn't have to worry about it being seen. The insulating shelter wall also kept heat radiation to a minimuma-the shelter itself sent most of the heat to a recoverer to recharge its electrets. So I was now invisible except at very close range, and could relax in my new home.

Shelters are always too hot on the inside the first night, before their brains catch the rhythm of the outside temperature, so once I had done the minimum unpacking and verified that the bed and linens had generated properly, I took off all my clothes. I stripped out of my outside suit, turned it inside out, and stuffed it into the recoverer, which would clean it thoroughly, extract and purify the water from the reservoirs, scavenge the body salts for anything useful, make sure the electrets were up to full charge, and finally drop out a couple of pebble-sized chunks of waste.

Naked and comfortable in the warm little room now, I said "Lights down" and dimmed them to the point where I could just see; that always helps me to sleep. I slid a narrow rectangular mealpak into the food reconst.i.tutor, waited a few minutes, and pulled out a tray with two small hamburgers, french fries, and baked beans, which I sat down and wolfed while the reconst.i.tutor turned another paka-this one more cubica-into a pot of hot chocolate.

Resuna told me that Mary was happy and thinking of me. The thought brought a friendly, warm glow to my heart. The meal and the hot chocolate were working their magic, and the rea.s.surance from Resuna was all I needed; I stretched out on top of the covers, told the bed to wake me at four the next morning, and fell sound asleep. All night I dreamed about old friends who were dead, and the way the world used to be, and the big empty s.p.a.ces around the pine-covered mountains.

When the bed squeezed me gently, twice, around the knees and back, I woke instantly. The lights came on dim and red, and a soft voice said "It's time, sir."

I sat up, enjoying the pleasant warmth of the shelter, dropped the blocks of breakfast and coffee into the reconst.i.tutor, and opened up the toilet side of the recoverer. Back when I had started as a cowboy hunter, we'd still been in tents, and had to make breakfast over a stove and dig our own latrines; the cooking was sort of romantic and quaint, I suppose, but one thing I had been glad to see the end of was the morning dash, through the far-below-freezing thin mountain air, to the slit trench. I told Resuna how much I had enjoyed waking up in camp; it might lead to One True's eventually encouraging more people to go camping.

After gobbling down the biscuits and gravy and drinking a couple of cups of coffee, I was ready to slip into the outside suit, strap on the day pack, and start the job. It was 6:20, about half an hour before the sun was due to come up. I carefully closed the flap and walked around the outside barrier that kept the brief flash of warmth from being visible through infrared scopes. For today I would be working my way down into the Dead Mule drainage, exploring this north side of it, to see what conditions were like on the ground and look for any places where someone might hide from the satellites.

I had gone only about 200 meters when what had looked like firm ground turned out to be a s...o...b..nk, which slipped away under my feet. For a weird instant, I seemed to hang in air, as if I had lost connection with the grounda-the moment of free fall when the snow no longer pushes against your bootsa-and then a whirling tumble as I got myself turned around, spread out my arms, and let myself fall face first onto the snow behind me, trying to stay up above the real trouble. I slid down the ridge, face down and feet first, for about thirty meters before coming to a stop and tentatively dragging myself forward about three feet to get up off the sliding part of the snow. I slowly rolled over, pointed my feet downhill, and, cursing softly into the face screen, looked down to see what I had done.

The first light of dawn was just beginning to break over the mountains to the east, and the tops of two mountains to the west were already touched with the arc-brightness of sun on snow. That gave me more than enough light to see by without using the amplifier.

The snowslide had only traveled 150 meters down the slope, b.u.mping along in a sheet rather than a rolling wave, never more than a meter deep or so. Unless he happened to look right at it when I touched it off, and saw me flopping around on top of it, the slide would look like the most natural thing in the world.

I sat up, took a sip of water, and let Resuna calm me; the worst I had been risking, probably, was just a plain old broken leg, which they fix pretty quickly these days, even in old guys like me. Something about that phrase, "the most natural thing in the world," was running through my head, the kind of clue that nags at you for days or weeks until you see what it was trying to call your attention to. Those sometimes turned out usefula-and more often led nowhere.

I scanned the valley slowly, playing with different magnifications and different wavelengths, and the only thing out and moving in the early dawn was a small herd of elk crunching their way down through the snow to drink from Dead Mule Creek, stopping often to look for willow shoots, or gra.s.s under the snow, or aspen twigs that they hadn't already chomped down during the long, bleak winter. When I'd been a kid, the government used to send out helicopters to drop hay to the elk, because it upset the voters if the elk starved, and so there were always way more elk than the land could handle naturally. Nowadays, Resuna took care of public upseta-and starvation, blizzards, wolves, and cougars took care of the elka-so we had spa.r.s.e, healthy elk.

I watched the little herd pick their way down to the firm part of the stream bank, a step at a time, following in each other's tracks. A muscular young bull led the way, turning and sniffing the wind now and then, looking about with huge brown eyes. The elk of the Rockies look like big mule deer, I guess, to the untrained eye, until you realize they're half again as big, and until you see that wild, cunning intelligence looking out of the eyes. In the old days, good hunters loved them and lazy hunters only saw them from the road.

The bull must have decided it was okay, and began to sc.r.a.pe at the stream bank with his front hooves. Two cows joined him, and a yearling that looked like it would be on his own soon, and shortly they were making all kinds of noise down there, breaking ice, pawing up gra.s.s, and having what elk must think is a good old time. In the cold, still dawn air, their breath rose in silvery columns, catching the sun that sliced between the trees above them in white flashes.

I looked at them in everything from infrared to X ray, and they looked pretty much like any herd of elk, eating, in late winter or early spring.

The most natural thing in the worlda That was what, somehow, Lobo must be managing to look like. Even back in the 2030s, satellite optics and computers had been good enough so that they could designate individual buffalo and elk for the Doleworkers to cull from the herds. Something the size of a human being, dressed only in regular cold-weather clothing, couldn't possibly remain concealed from overhead satellites for more than a decade, and yet obviously something had.

He must still have a working insulating/storage suit, and somewhere to run a heat exchanger that wasn't noticeable. That meant in turn he had to have somewhere to charge his suit, and that meant a not-very-likely sizable power source someplace. He couldn't be stealing off the grid because that would be noticed immediately, but most kinds of generators, electrets, or batteries were just as visible from orbit, more visible even than the man himself would be.

Or maybe I was thinking too much like a modern, civilized cowboy hunter, and not enough like a crazy but very smart cowboy. I tried to come at the problem another way and think about how small a profile he would have to have to remain concealeda-that is, how small must he look to sensors and screens in order to be lumped into the landscape?

What if he had gone completely wild, living out there with a flint-tipped spear, building fires only far back under rock shelves, sleeping on the ground, acting like a Paleolithic hunter who was afraid of high-flying predators that could see in the infrared?

Then where had his clothes come from, and how had his beard been trimmed neatly, when he turned up again? More to the point, human beings are big animals, and the satellites and databases did track big animals individually, so why hadn't they tracked Lobo?

Elk, bear, buffalo, moose, mustang, deer, wolf, coyote, mountain goat, bighorn, cougara-those, according to Resuna when it checked with One True, were the animals in the immediate area who were regularly tracked as individuals rather than as herds or flocks. All of them took up more than a square meter, had mammalian body temperatures, and ma.s.sed over twenty kilos.

Lobo had to take up something close to two square meters every time he lay downa-and you can hardly survive by hunting if you don't lie down now and then. If he was ever out of an insulating suit, he was more than warm enough to register on infrared. And even as gaunt as he had gotten, he must still ma.s.s at least seventy kilos. He was way over the threshold where he should have been detectable.

He must have a way of looking, to any satellite overhead, like anything else you would find in the wild country out here. He had to have had it for most of a decade. And whatever it was, it must have gotten lost or stopped working recently, bringing him out into the open.

Resuna remained absolutely quiet and let me work through it; very likely One True had already had some of these thoughts and was waiting to see if I came up with a different answer, or even a better one. After a while I was forced to concede that I still didn't have a clue, and I gingerly stood up, afraid that some of the surface under me might give again. I couldn't climb down the slide, since it was bound to be unstable for a couple of days, and death in a small slide is not much of an improvement over death in a full-fledged avalanche. Probably I should work my way down across the gentler slope to the west.

I got out the flexis and set them to configure as Nordic skis, plugging them into my suit and letting them take their time about forming up. The elk, below, finished their morning elk-business, and formed a straggly procession going back up the slope. For a moment I wondered, idly, if Lobo might have disguised himself to look, at least to overhead satellites, like some common animal; but the thought of Lobo crouching out there in an elk suit seemed just too wildly improbable.

The flexis had set and cooled into skis, so I unplugged them, strapped them on, and pulled out the extensor poles and telescoped them into position. Trying to hold it to one unpleasant surprise this morning, I took it very slow and easy.

This whole area had been pretty much abandoned in the aftermath of the Eurowar, when so many people fled into the cities for law and order and their share at the food distribution centers; now, ninety years later, it was "natural" insofar as what was happening out here was wild and unmanaged.

But it wasn't anything like it might have "naturally" been. The first decade or so after the war, before blight-resistant cover plants had been bred back into existence, had been bad for the land. Many shallow draws had been cut by water into deep ravines and gullies, and after cover had begun to grow again, it had taken many slopes some decades to re-shape.

The loads of silt and mud had altered the rivers as well, aging them rapidly, making them wind and twist in strange patterns that shouldn't have happened for another ice age or twoa-and the growth of the new glaciers on the highest peaks had put still another stress on the Colorado mountains. Add to that the fires in the dead forests, and the sudden surges and retreats of a dozen bio-engineered plant species as they fought with a variety of non-native weeds and some species that were probably escaped ecoweapons, and it had been past 2025 before you could predict what might be growing wherea-if anything wasa-anywhere in the high country, and almost up to the beginning of the War of the Memes, a quarter-century beyond that, before field ecologists were writing with any a.s.surance about what was out here.

The animals had recovered quickly enough; between the Die-Off and the Eurowar, plus the epidemics that had followed in its wake, the area hadn't been much needed by people, so as soon as there were plants for food and cover, animal populations had surged back. With so many cities and settlements deserted, and much less land under cultivation, they had migrated freely, and by the beginning of the War of the Memes the grizzly and wolf were all the way back to the old Mexican border, and the herds of buffalo were again beginning to carpet the Great Plains as they had two centuries before. And yet the differences remained: wild longhorns in Texas, a huge wolf-dog-coyote crossbreed that ranged from the Rio Grande to the Platte, bigger and stronger mustangs thanks to the infusion of domestic draft horses. Any forester could have pointed out any number of things different from what they had been a century ago, in any part of the drainage.

My first long glide across the slope was successful; the snow skidded out from under my skis no more than one might expect, the edges bit into the sun-formed crust easily enough, and by the end of that first swoop I was perhaps ten meters lower, and a quarter of a kilometer to the west. I made a big, awkward, snowplow turn like a beginner to avoid having any speed at all as I swung back east; the snow would be deeper now and I intended to take it at a steeper angle, so as not to be up here all day. Again it held, with one scary moment when I slipped sideways for a few seconds on some thicker crust, and now I was down into the heavy, partially-refrozen, pellet-like corn snow that you have to expect on a southern exposure this time of year. It's treacherous, but it can be managed. A few more wide, slow, careful turns brought me down to where the ground began to level off into a gentler slope toward the creek.

The satellite pa.s.sing overhead told me, via Resuna, that nothing was visible anywhere, but I didn't entirely trust that. Many cowboys, especially the loners of the last few years of hunting, had become pretty fair jackleg mechanics, and every now and then one of them thought of something simple and effectivea-it had to be simple because they didn't have the resources to do anything sophisticated, and if it wasn't effective, they didn't last long between the mountains and the hunters.

Of course, Lobo was out in the open, now. So maybe whatever his miracle gadget was, it had broken down, and now it would be just a routine hunt. But just as possibly he was showing himself for some other reason entirely. I resolved to try to work as if he might be within fifty meters of me, all the time, and take it slow and easy. I would be looking for anything that resembled tracksa-but at the same time I would be leaving mine, and I knew that I didn't have any way of hiding my tracks, whatever Lobo might be able to do.

Now that I was down in the easier country, I pushed off and skated slowly and carefully westward. There was some old sandstone in the local surface rock, and it was possible he might have found a cave somewhere, or even dug one if he had somewhere to hide his debris pile. Some mining claims went back 150 years and morea-perhaps he'd found some old tunnel to move into. But that would only explain where he slept and holed up; how did he move around without being detected?

Well, when in doubt, start with basics. People eat. Lobo had to have been eating something. What he was eating had to be either stolen food, stored food, or wild food. I didn't believe he could steal for more than a decade and not come to One True's attention before this. Ten years of food is a lot to store somewhere. That left wild fooda-hunting and gathering. So he was relying on wild game, especially in the winter.

The best place to find wild game is where it drinks, so I decided to take a brief patrol along the creek.

I took my time getting there, going downhill in safe, slow snowplows almost as often as I paralleled. If I screwed up on this first daya-twisted an ankle or something and had to be rescueda-I would be humiliated by having let One True down, and embarra.s.sed by the mess that would be made of the hunt by having to bring a diskster up here. Worse, I would be out of action and somebody else would get my cowboy.

<> An hour and a half later, it was almost noon. I was sweating buckets into the suit, the charge in the electrets was at 100%, all heat reservoirs were likewise full, and I had turned off the pre-warmer on the air circulator because I needed the cooling from breathing the mountain air.

I only had to go two kilometers down the elk trail to Dead Mule Creek, but that was plenty. Elk do not have a skier's idea of what is a usable trail. The pathway wove through stands of trees, broke from brush on one side of a meadow and, after disappearing among a stand of young aspen, took a plunge down a bank into dense undergrowth.

When I finally came down through a bunch of beaver-felled aspen to the bank, the sun was high in the sky, and I was hot and uncomfortable. But a quick scan showed no trace of Lobo, nor any other human being. Probably there wasn't a single person between me and Mary, in the cabin a hundred and ten kilometers awaya-this part of the world had always been empty and in the past century it had gotten emptier.

At best I would have two hours down here before I would need to start working my way back to base, but then my opponent had only a very limited amount of time when he could move around, too. The chances of our both being in the same place during those brief periods were pretty slim. But I only had to catch him once, and he had to evade me every day. If I didn't catch him for a whole year, he could be ahead of me 365-1 at the moment I collared hima-and I would still be the winner. Patience would do the job, more than anything else.

Down here by the stream, the warmer air had made a mess of the snow. When you're trying to stalk someone, it's hard to believe how many ways heavily weathered snow can be frustrating. It crunches constantly, breaks with loud cracks, and makes appalling squealing and grinding sounds against your skis. It grabs unpredictably, always threatening to dump you on your b.u.t.t. If you fall down it makes a noise like a giant folding a garbage truck. If you don't fall down you still leave painfully sharp and clear tracks. Every so often it turns into sheet ice that can send you rocketing downslope, struggling for control.

Soon I was thinking too much about my skiing and not enough about my hunting. I finally got a clear view of a path down to the creek, and shot down it, alternately snowplowing and paralleling as best I could, turning often in big wide turns, bouncing around on the slope like a rubber ball down a storm culvert.

I was watching for somewhere good to pull into, and not finding it, so I kept trying to slow downa-which wasn't so easy either. The snow under my skis screamed, thumped, skittered, and sprayed, giving me no solid grip; I was staying upright almost purely on balance. At least I was cooling off. The air coming in through my breather was almost clean and cold.

I turned up onto a rise to spill some speed, climbing up and then doing quick loop turns back down. The winding creek was still some distance below me, but the clumps of tall pines were much farther apart now, and there looked to be a nice, easy path at a reasonable slope. I had skied for almost a quarter-kilometer before I realized I must be on some long-abandoned road. In another hundred meters, I saw something by the roadside, and almost didn't believe it. I circled back and checked again.

There, partly covered by the snow, was a badly smudged print where something had been slipping down a gravel bank and had to brace itself. It was too wide for elk or deer, and had no claw marks like a bear; the heel was suggestively narrow where it had stamped in hard. And not far from thata-again, the distance of something under half a meter suggested a lota-another smudged print, presumably where he had boosted himself back up. That clinched that it wasn't a beara-the weight, marked by the deepest depression, was much too far forward in the track. I searched in that area for another half hour and turned up three more badly smudged prints.

Squatting down till my eye was almost at snow level, I looked toward the creek. Farther down the hill a low, chaotic mess of crumpled and broken snow, less than two meters across, told me my man had taken a flying somersault after leaping the road.

Judging by what was packed into the shadow side of his tracks, he was using one very-low-tech method of evading detectiona-going out during snowstorms, so that most of his track would disappear to satellite observation before the clouds cleared.

The pattern argued that he had been descending when he pa.s.sed this point, on the way to somewhere else, but I had no way to know how often he went there. Possibly he often took this patha-or would, until the first time he saw my ski tracks leading up to it.

I skied back a short distance, feeling that odd p.r.i.c.kle you get when it's a distant but not zero probability that someone will shoot at you. This area looked like an old-fas.h.i.+oned Christmas carda-the vivid cobalt sky, the absolutely white snow, the greens shading from sun-spattered forest to nearly black in the shadows. The road behind me, leading up eventually to the ridge where my camp was, despite all the bright eye-stabbing daylight, looked suddenly weird, threatening, and hostile, the way a path through a public park at night looks to a young child.

Resuna steadied my nerves. I felt all my skills come to the forefront of my mind.

I found a place where I could climb the hill, just about twenty-five meters back, and herringboned up onto the bank. Remembering that Lobo himself had slipped, I stayed wide of the road.

If he didn't come this way often, the track was information but useless; if he did, the information would be useless to me the first time he saw my ski tracks. So I had to follow his trail in one direction or another, right now. The melting on the edges of a couple of the tracks had suggested that they were days old.

I picked up his trail easily enough; he was moving from rock to bare dirt to snow, stepping from one to the other in an irregular pattern, so that an AI looking at satellite photos was unlikely to see any pattern to it (especially since only the tracks in the snow would show well from orbit). But to the naked human eye, looking up the slope and just letting things have enough time to group and arrange themselves, the pattern was perfectly obvious. I could see his track or tracksa-my guess was that he had been this way many times more than oncea-right up to where the ridgeline slashed the pure blue winter sky. I felt like whooping for pure joy. That's the way it feels when you know that One True has put you right where you most belong.

Lobo was clever, and he'd had a long run of making no mistakes at all, but all runs come to an end. Though, h.e.l.l, even this didn't really count as a mistake; just one of those inevitable things that has to happen because no one can control everything. If I had the good fortune to bring him in, especially if when I brought him in he was still in shape fit to be turned, then at the cowboy hunter reunions I would have a tale to tell that surpa.s.sed anyone else's.

I checked my time. It was nearly 3:30 P.M.; the sun would be setting in two hours.

I doubted that I could follow his track clear up the hill before dark, but I had to try. This was clearly a frequent path for him, and he couldn't fail to miss my tracks when he came this way next. I had to push as far as I could, and find a place to set up an ambush the next day, or even tonight if it looked promising enough.

According to the satellite map on my face screen, his path angled slightly toward my camp. That meant a shorter haul back to base, a longer time I could stay out, possibly an easier position for the ambush. On the other hand, I would be going uphill, crossing ridgelines, and if he happened to be on this path ahead of me, he would be the one with a perfect ambush.

I shrugged and got going. You have to not only be lucky, but feel lucky, to hunt cowboys. And on this beautiful day, I didn't think I could feel anything but lucky.

I could be up all night, if I had to, anyway.

Herringboning is an efficient way to climb a hill in the snow, but efficiency is relativea-all you can really say for it is that it is easier than boots or snowshoes. It's still lots of work. By the time I cleared the first ridgeline and could look on up the slope to the nexta-and to the distant white peak that gleamed over it for a momenta-I was sweating as if I'd been stoking a furnace. Resuna adjusted my inner thermometer, but nothing compensated for the heat produced in my large muscles. The suit's heat storage was at 120%, which is 10% more than when you're supposed to stop and dump heat.

I moved into the shadow of a large boulder, took off the radiator, set it on the ground, and shoveled snow onto it. The snow flashed off. I did that several times, each time releasing a cloud of white vapor, which might give my position away if Lobo just happened to be right in the neighborhood and looking right at me, but if I got rid of enough heat, I would again be able to breathe and function without having a telltale infrared signature.

Besides, he'd have to be nearly on top of me to see it today. In the shade, and in the thin cold air, the clouds rose less than two meters before they turned to ice crystals and tumbled away invisibly on the wind. I was careful to make sure that the cloud of vapor didn't drift into the sunlight before it froze. He'd have to be looking right at this part of the mountain to catch me.

I gulped some warm water, swallowed a few bites of the blueberry-flavored field rations, and systematically studied the fresh slope above me. Knowing his way of moving, I could pick out his path pretty quickly, and soon I was herringboning along his pathway, now warm without being hot, and refreshed by the food and water. I went at it hard, making good time.

Checking the satellite map, I saw that I was still angling toward my base camp; I might have only a couple hundred meters to go to get home, if the pattern held. There would be two more ridgelines before I reached the top, but I doubted that he was going all the way to the topa-not with a decent pa.s.s just two kilometers west. Probably the tracks would start to angle west either over this next ridgeline, or the one after it.

I worked steadily up the hill, following the footprints closely, not cutting across his track, because you never know what additional clues might be around any one track. However, because Lobo had not been in much of a hurry, he hadn't dropped anything or torn anything off his clothes, or broken any branches. Unlike so many pursuits I'd been on, he wasn't bleeding, either.

I pushed my way over the next ridgeline without stopping, exulting in the chill taste of the thin air and the thunder of blood in my ears, but when I got to where I could see what came next, I was somewhere between muttering and swearing. It hadn't been especially visible from the satellites, being long and thin and rimmed with trees, but I was looking right at an old rockslide, and that was just where the few tracks I could see led.

If you're evading capture, old slides are your best friends in the mountains. There's all the bare rock you could ever want to put your hands and feet on, and furthermore, unless the guy tracking you knows the rockslide as well as you do, it's dangerous. A rockslide is only a temporarily stopped river of scree, and it can start flowing again with almost any provocation. Once you've worked out a safe path through one, by slow and cautious exploration, anyone coming along after you is going to have a h.e.l.l of a time figuring out where you've gone, and will have to go very, very slowly if he wants to follow you up the slide without running the risk of getting killed.

So I stared at that dead end, trying to think of what to do next. It was less than an hour till sunset, and good as the light amplifiers were nowadays, they still couldn't find faint tracks in dirt under a tree after dark. I would have to give this up soon no matter what I decided.

It was looking like an excellent time to just turn and head for home, unless I saw his tracks leading off the rockslide somewhere. After a thorough search with binoculars, I didn't. I checked with the satellite and it was just as I had feared; the rockslide bent in an L shape farther up, and ran for almost a kilometer along the face of this big ridge; in at least fifty places, trees and brush got near enough to it to provide an invisible escape off the scree and into the woods. My best hope would be to search each of those potential escapes, one by one, probably the west side first. It would take most of the day tomorrow.

I was well and truly screwed: I had no tricks left to find him with. Probably he would find me first. Maybe he wouldn't come that way for another day or so, but that wasn't much to hang my hope on. Badly discouraged, I turned for home.

There was a deep draw on my direct path home to camp, too, and skirting around that through the woods meant that I didn't reach camp till the full moon was up again. At least it was so late that my post-sunset watch over the valley had only half an hour to go. I sat down in the snow, sipped warm water from the suit, chewed a chocolate ration bar, swept the valley in all wavelengths over and over, anda-despite Resuna's proddinga-felt extremely (lorry for myself. Exactly on the minute, I gave up the watch, just as fruitless as the pursuit had been, and went inside.

I staggered into the shelter, tired and cold, with the ominous feeling I was getting old. Resuna crept quietly into the less-conscious part of my awareness, like a friendly old cat sneaking onto your lap, and I let it hang around there to see what it could do.

The hot soup and noodles that I reconst.i.tuted were one of the best meals I ever had, the bed felt remarkably good, and just as I stretched out, my copy of Resuna pa.s.sed along, via One True, a warm, deep feeling of affection from Mary; she missed me but she was happy and comfortable at home. The warmth, dark, and silence got me to sleep right away.

<> I suppose that in my youth, I might have been a hero to little kids. After all, I was a cop, and there had always been great numbers of shows about cops in the days before memes.

Resuna and I have argued about this many times. I say that people were attracted to cops because so many of them were good-looking guysa-young, alert, in great shape. Besides, uniforms and guns always got attention.

Resuna says what all the attraction to the cops was about was that most of humanity was looking forward to the creation of the memes and eventually of the One True meme. Resuna has a tendency to see One True wherever it looks, which I guess isn't very different from what human beings used to do when they saw G.o.ds everywhere.

What Resuna says is that the police were always the agents of order. Society runs on order. Hence the police always sent the message, whenever they appeared, on the street or in entertainment, that order was good, order should be sought, and that human beings who helped to make order were better than human beings who helped to destroy it.

Resuna never has convinced me, but we argued for years. It was a good way to while away otherwise dull time on stakeouts; it didn't interfere with seeing or hearing and it made no noise. I know Moonchild Swann used to play chess with her copy of Resuna, and it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that during stakeout, everybody was locked in some kind of conversation with Resuna. All that it was, was that the conversations I preferred were vaguely philosophic arguments, was all.

Every so often, to vary the argument, and because Resuna is always helping everyone examine their feelings and helping them to stay a valid and fully compatible unit within One True, Resuna would work through the issue with me, not as a philosophic matter, but as an emotional one: did I wish that I had lived in a previous era when an individual such as I might have been a hero? Did I dream about such times, or feel disappointed that I hadn't been part of them? Or if I didn't wish that I could have been a hero, did I sometimes regret, perhaps, that I had not lived in the intermediate generations when heroes gave way to role models?

Heroes were people who were idolized and admired for being bigger and better than you thought anybody could bea-dreams of what a human being might struggle forever to just barely live up to. They were visions of what was beyond the human, structured in a way that called forth the human maximum.

Role models were friendlier, squis.h.i.+er concepts, for the friendly, squishy times in which they formed. They were people that you could imagine being; people you knew, who you were surea-given some efforta-you could be like. It was the essence of a hero to be at or beyond the human boundary; it was the essence of a role model to be well within it, to be something that a human being could reasonably aspire to be.

And finally, at our point in history, there were no heroes anymore, and there were no role models, but there was what I wasa-for which there didn't need to be a word, because, though we cowboy hunters and other people who did dangerous, individual jobs, were useful, we were no longer important. One True could draw pieces from any of the vast number of its component Resunas and individual psyches, all over the Earth. If any child, or anyone at all, needed my approach to the world, emotional att.i.tude, moral qualities, or any other bit or piece of my way of doing things, at any time in life, she or he could have it instantly, not by laboriously copying external actions until they became habits and then parts of nature, but by an easy direct transfera-One True would call my copy of Resuna, which would copy the required piece of my personality and upload it to One True, which would then download it via the child's copy of Resuna.

Resuna says it was really just a matter of the human race developing a more efficient process for moving information from one brain to another; the structures we called heroes were the oldest, crudest, and least-efficient system for copying virtues. If unusual courage and cunning existed in Odysseus, and the rest of his culture wanted to share them, his courage and cunning had to be told and retold at aural speeds, from mouth to ear, over and over again, until they were sharpened into a particularly clear and memorable form, and then the text had to be repeated to people until the merest mention of Odysseus would fill the mind with the drive to be clever and the self-perception of courage, for anyone who heard it.

Role models, as a way of transmitting virtues, were less thrilling and perhaps traded away some high resolution and clarity in order to be able to reach more people, more thoroughly and faster. The role-model method of transmitting virtues was to train a child to see her or his own abilities and potentials in the people around him. That didn't produce the excellence that the heroes had, since no one ever reached beyond what had already been achieved; at best it produced a competence that only degraded slowly from generation to generation. But it did provide very effective socialization. You didn't get any more high soarers, but nearly everyone took off and flew for a ways.

In this century, direct transfer of information, brain to brain, via Resuna and One True, provided greater accuracy and clarity than the "hero" protocol, and greater efficiency and wider accessibility than the "role-model" protocola-I could almost think I heard Resuna preening about the subject. The personal traits of people like me and the other specialists working for One Truea-not just the hunters but the engineers, rangers, ecologists, scouts, and all the other dedicated units that put high skill and personal courage and integrity at the service of the planeta-were available to every person on Earth, whenever they needed to be like us. Ordinary people no longer had to form those qualities by long habit of practice; they were directly available just as soon as you needed them.

It was as if every Greek had been able to be possessed by the spirit of Odysseus at will, as if every athlete had an inspirational coach at his elbow and every preacher heard the voice of his G.o.d directly, and perhaps most important, in the long run, it was as if every parent could be the best parent on Earth. And so the reified, studied, carefully rehea.r.s.ed and ingrained examplesa-the heroes and role modelsa-pa.s.sed from human memory, except as characters in old stories, for whom fewer and fewer people had any time or interest. One True had largely stopped bothering even with revising those old stories, since they no longer received the attention that might allow them to do harm, and any benefit they might exert could be achieved by more effective means.

Those were the thoughts I drifted awake with, shading into Resuna's usual celebration of morninga-how good it is to contribute, how important it is to be a part of something bigger than yourself, how much one must rejoice in the strength of One True, and in the sanity that Resuna brings to your life. Resuna usually ran something like that through my head in the morning; my copy of Resuna and I shared the joke that it was a sort of mouthwash against spiritual morning breath, for often, when I was waking from sleep, my old memories c.r.a.pped up my view of the "world.

When I had served in Burton's Thugs for Jesus, we had been a relatively respectable outfit, but we had also been mercenary soldiers. There had been things I had seen my comrades do, and things I myself had done, that still, late at night, sometimes could disturb my sleep despite everything Resuna could do, and despite all the comfort of waking to find Mary beside me. Now, drifting awake, comfortably naked on the warm bed, with a day of challenging, productive work ahead of mea-work that I knew it was terribly important to doa-I drank in the sense of my place in One True, and thus in the perfection of human history, like a magic restorative honey in some old fantasya-sweeter than anything else could possibly taste, and bringing me strength, welling inexhaustibly from within me.

When I went outside in the pre-dawn, it had snowed, and exactly the wrong amounta-not enough to obscure the fresh tracks I had made the day before, but very likely enough to cover Lobo's older, already partially melted trail.

It was also extremely cold, as it so often is in the mountains in the hours just after a snowfall. No stars shone, and the moon was an occasional yellowish smear in the west that never quite broke through the clouds; probably a high nimbus hanging over the area, enough to keep the "warming sun out, not enough to hold ground heat in. It was going to be a real stinker of a morning.

You do your job even on bad days, so I turned up the temperature in my suit to warm the stiffness out of my joints, and sat up on the ridge for the dawn watch, scanning mostly in infrared because there was so little light in the visible band. I focused on the area where I knew his trail ran, but I saw nothing of Lobo. That could be because he had not come that way yet, or it could just as easily be because during the night he had seen my clumsy tracks from the day before, knew what was up, and was now four drainages away and running like a scared cat.

In infrared, the sun shone through the clouds as a great bright sprawling spider. The morning was so cold, and the light that filtered through the high clouds so feeble, that even after the sun had been up for half an hour, there was too little contrast to really see properly in the infrared: everything was about the same (painfully low) temperature.

It was still pritnear dark as night in the visible spectrum, but I flipped back to it, cranking up amplification to the maximum, to break the monotony. No Lobo, nothing moving, no sign that I wasn't the only thing alive that morning.

When the sun had been up for an hour, I went back into the shelter, had a quick breakfast, and suited up again. It looked like I would just have to stay on plan, since nothing better had appeared so far.

I shaped my flexis into telemark skis, let them cool, and pushed off; now that I knew where I was going, I could go much more efficiently. Fighting my way around that deep draw the night before had convinced me that I'd be better off going down and then up; besides, since that old road cut right across one of his major pathways, probably it would cut across more than one. I skied to the nearest convenient high point on the road, and started my search from there, slowly drifting down the road between the gray trees and the gray rocks, under a blurry gray sky, as the temperature continued to fall and little bits of sleet occasionally spit out of the sky and skittered down the hood of my suit. Without the satellite guidance, I'd have felt hopelessly lost in no time at all; as it was, I had to check my position every few minutes.

I was down at the place where I had found his trail, the day before, in only about an hour, and although it was now beginning to snow in earnest, at least that made a more pleasant surface for skiing, might help in hiding my tracks, and was sort of pretty in the gray, silent forest.

The tracks down here, on the lower part of the slope, were covered by the drifting snow, but I followed the satellite's guidance up the hill to where Lobo's track had petered out, going up onto that old rockslide. I planned to cast back and forth along the west side, up to the top of the ridge, and then work my way back down the east, looking for the place where Lobo got on or off the rockslidea-or perhaps even to see a print or two in the fresh snow on the scree, if by any chance he had come this way the night before.

I stamped up the gentle slopes and herringboned up the steep ones, making good time but only by dint of buckets of sweat. By the time I got up to the slide itself, it was almost mid-morning, and I stopped to open a ration pocket, take out a warm cheese sandwich and a pouch of tomato soup, and swallow those, chasing them down with a pouch of hot coffee.

This time, knowing that it could be a long day and I might not be getting home till well past dark, I had loaded all seven ration pockets on the suit with reconst.i.tuted stuff that could stay warm all day. Besides, it gave me more heat sinks for my body heat without having to vent and make myself visible in the infrared.