Century Next Door - Candle Part 3

I made sure the next pocket from which I intended to eat was set to warm, and that the other pockets were to stay at ambient unless they were needed as auxiliary heat sinks, and got back on my way, herringboning up the west side of the scree, gliding about in each successive little tongue of forest or brush that presented itself, until I was sure I'd have picked up any track. There was no trace.

Today, besides coping with the cold, the clouds, and the bad luck and fruitlessness, I was going to have three long gaps in satellite coverage, all in the afternoon. Normally the periods when a satellite can't pick up the signal from the jack in your forehead, even out in a less-covered area like this, were only about four or five minutes long at worst. If you were line of sight from SNY, or from the towers of the several new supras now under construction, antennas on any of them could give you continuous coverage.

But as it happened, a satellite had recently gone off-line, and the repair crews hadn't yet gotten up there to do anything about it. Therefore, today, in perfect accord with its being a s.h.i.+tty day, there would be three big holes in my coverage, each something over twenty minutes long. Most of what I was doing was on north-facing slopes, and since the supras hang above the equator, I would have no line of sight to any of them, most of the time.

Three minutes during which you're on your own, when your copy of Resuna can't raise One True, is scary enougha-you could be hurt, captured, or killed with no way of calling for backup and evacuationa-but in twenty minutes you could not only get killed, you could get disappeared. Two cowboy hunters from the old days were still listed as MIAa-and both of them had vanished during "brief" satellite lapses, presumably either dying in some bizarre accident or killed by a cowboy, with their bodies never recovered.

Resuna was trying to be rea.s.suring, pointing out that it was always there to help, but help from a meme running in your brain, and help from the combined minds and resources of the entire Earth, are very different. When a big, strong, clever man may suddenly try to kill you, you really want the latter.

On the other hand, if Lobo was coordinating his movements with the satellite gapsa-and if he also knew about the dead one, and wasn't just coordinating by watching for them with binoculars and plotting orbitsa-then this was exactly the day and time he would be out, and the chances of my finding him were much better. The chances of catching him if I did find him were a different matter.

After climbing for another hour, and checking out three more innocent stands of trees without finding any trace of Lobo, I had Resuna contact One True and check back through the files. Kelly and her mother had been attacked during a time when two satellites were fully up in the sky and in line of sight, so maybe Lobo didn't pay any attention to the gaps in coverage. Too, the remote photos of him had to have happened with a satellite above the horizon. And twice he had been photographed crossing a south-facing slope with a direct line of sight to Supra New York. Chances were he wasn't coordinating with satellite pa.s.ses, so he was not unusually likely to be out, today.

Just after two o'clock, not long after the first gap in satellite coverage, I was finally at the head of the old rockslide, a remnant cliff where a tower of volcanic tuff had fallen down sometime in the last century or so. I squatted down on a snow-covered boulder, looking out across the wide valley before me. The day was turning nastier, hard though that was to believe.

Far below, on the flat floodplain around Dead Mule Creek, I could see the wild swirls of the little ground blizzards. In the old days there had been auto accidents because of those things; someone would come around a bend in the road on a clear day, and a smear of white would erase all vision just when someone else, similarly blinded, drifted across the center line, or when the road turned out to be occupied by a wandering steer, or when the next bend hid a school bus that had stopped to drop off a ranch kid. People didn't drive themselves anymore, and machines could see right through a ground blizzard or call up a satellite and look over the top, but still something evil, frightening, almost alive lurked in the white swirls, a kilometer across and a meter high, that alternately hid and exposed the frozen creek.

I gobbled the macaroni and cheese, hamburg steak, peas, and warm apple tart of my mid-afternoon second lunch; Resuna informed me that this was what had once been called a "popular television dinner," but I didn't bother to find out what that meant. Every so often Resuna just hands you a fact, with nothing attached to it to explain why you should want to know. There are people in Sursumcorda, old-timers who turned late in life and perhaps not willingly, who whisper that it's a bug in the system. I always feel bad about having my copy of Resuna report them.

The wind was rising. Minus ten Celsius, and falling. The firs on the slopes were whipping and dancing like mad drunks; the aspens bowed and bowed endlessly like compulsively obsequious servants; and even up here, high on the ridge without much snow upwind of me, the blowing snow was obscuring my view off and on.

It was senseless to try to find any of Lobo's tracks now; the weather would erase most of them before I got there, and in this miserable visibility I would not be able to see whatever trace might be preserved in a sheltered hollow, or to the windward of a rock or tree. Yet there were still nearly four hours of daylight, and I really didn't want to just ski home and sit out the bad weather in the shelter.

I could ski down the side of this ridge to where the old road joined with a larger road, far below where I had first picked up Lobo's tracks. A junction of two roads near a known sighting of a cowboy was a pretty good place to hunt. Furthermore, a check with satellite records showed that the terrain was reasonablea-during most of the last portion I'd be following an old ski trail left over from one of the many abandoned resorts up here.

Once I got down there, I'd just follow the old road back to a point near my camp. That would be mostly uphill and should take the rest of the afternoon, especially if it snowed more or the wind picked up. If I found nothing, no harm donea-the odds had been against it anywaya-and I would then just herringbone up the hill to my camp, get home just before dark, and turn in early that evening for a fresh start after the bad weather blew over.

But maybe Lobo used the old road down below regularly, and watched it. If so, I might be able to ski into an ambush. If he didn't manage to kill me in the first few secondsa-and the suit was projectile-resistant, especially for old-fas.h.i.+oned bullets at long range, and I was in great shape with my fighting skills freshly replenisheda-then backup units would come swarming in, and all I'd have to do would be to hold him long enough so that he could be captured.

Then again, if by sheer bad luck a satellite blank spot coincided with falling into his ambush, that might just even the odds enough for him to get awaya-and for me to get dead. A lot can happen in a few seconds, and ten minutes can be forever in certain kinds of emergencies.

I could have waited till the next day, when there would be only two very brief interruptionsa-but that would mean running the risk of having Lobo see the tracks, or even of following them back to my camp and taking me. It was possible that I still had surprise on my side, and that even if I didn't, he hadn't had time to either prepare to fight or to run. But an advantage of that kind spoils fast; you use it right now or you might as well have thrown it away.

I pushed off toward the junction. Since I had the time, I treated myself to doing all kinds of hot-doggy stuff on my run down the hill, enjoying the experience as my own audience; long ago I'd have despised someone who did big, vigorous, show-offy turns like these, but back then, my knees hadn't hurt after a long day on skis.

When I got down far enough to pick up the old ski trail, it was full of brush in the center, but along the north side, where the tall pines and firs shaded it during summer and the ice lay on the ground till late spring, it was still more than clear enough. And three or four meters of powder will cover most of the rocks, bushes, and odds and ends; probably in the old days, if this much snow had fallen, the people who owned and ran that abandoned ski resort would have thought they had died and gone to heaven. Chances were they had died, anyway, at least by now.

Resuna, trying to give me a balanced view, kept talking about the ecological damage. It reminded me of the glaciers that had already eaten old towns like Crested b.u.t.te and Leadville, and might well bury towns as far south as Santa Fe before they were done, and the scablands that now covered the Rio Grande valley, caused by all the ice dams forming and breaking up on the tributaries that sent scouring floods down the river every third year or so.

Me, I just enjoyed the fact that the deepest, most untouched snow I would ever encounter was all spread out in front of me, and it was all mine. I shot down that hill feeling more and more like a teenager, bouncing and bobbing, spraying huge rooster-tails of snow behind mea-what the h.e.l.l, it might conceivably call attention to me, and make it more likely that Lobo would set up the ambush that I would be trying to trip.

After checking the satellite image of my path, I turned out of the old ski run with tremendous momentum and dashed across a small meadow, then shot through a grove of aspen. As I ascended the gentle slope up to a low saddle, I coasted to an almost-stop, let myself fall forward to conserve the last tiny bit of momentum, and then hurled myself up the slope in the closest thing to a flying herringbone you can do. In a few seconds I had covered the hundred meters or so to the top, and I coasted to a spot among the trees from which I looked down on the junction of the two old roads, an easy minute away, and rested for a moment.

Resuna asked me why I enjoyed this so much. I tried to make sure that Resuna understood the exhilaration of running on your own best skills, far out from any other people, in spectacular country, but I had little hope that it would be such a compelling explanation that One True would allow more people to come out to the wilderness. Better to pack humans together in cities, from an engineering and energy-efficiency standpoint, and the small amount of necessary pollution could be concentrated into a more easily handled point source. The all-but-mortally damaged ecology of the Earth just plain couldn't handle the extra load that tourists would impose, not just yet anyway. Probably, at best, I had supplied One True with something that it would want to introduce, as a "new" idea, in another generation or two when the Earth was well on its way back to health.

I thought it was possible, too, that the experience of the run through the trees might be copied into quite a few people's memories. Like the little boy in Germany whose surprise birthday party, at age eight, was now part of everyone's experience of childhood, or Katie Rafter, the young woman whose wedding we all remembered from her viewpoint, I might be added in as the perfect backcountry skiing experience. Thanks to One True, nowadays everyone who really needed or wanted an experience could be a.s.sured of having a vivid memory of the best possible version of it. It was even possible that the total social benefit from my addition to the library might outweigh the contribution of bringing Lobo in.

I leaned forward, pushed off, and slid onto the shallow slope beyond, skiing a single, big Ca-curve down onto the old road. In the low temperature, the fresh-fallen snow squeaked under my skis. A very dim circle of sun was appearing high in the sky in the south; you could almost imagine it might come out.

Every cowboy hunter I ever knew agreed that there had to be a liny touch of the cowboy in every cowboy hunter, and I suppose that's true. I always had a streak of pride in me that Resuna could do nothing with. Just now, having made such a good run, that part of my nature was truly kicking in; I hoped that Lobo had seen me, partly because I wanted to attract his attention and flush him from cover, but also becausea-Resuna insisted that I admit thisa-because he was obviously a highly skilled, experienced outdoorsman, and I wanted his respect.

I started trudging up the gentle slope of the old road, planting And pus.h.i.+ng like a beginner. This wouldn't be nearly the fun that skiing down had been.

I would have to move in an irregular pace, sometimes openly, sometimes with more stealth, sometimes rus.h.i.+ng ahead and sometimes d.o.g.g.i.ng it, to throw his rhythm off. It's easy to surprise a guy who moves along at a steady pace in a predictable path. It's harder when he's alternately rus.h.i.+ng and dallying, hiding and showing himself, giving you too much data to a.n.a.lyze but not enough information to figure him out. We'd see if a cowboy could handle that any better than a hunter.

For the next two hours, as I covered about half the distance hack to camp, I stuck with that plan. Now and again I'd skate hard and rush along like a rocket; every so often I'd just sit down and have something to eat. Sometimes I'd cut off a couple bends on the road by skiing across a meadow, thoroughly exposed to view; sometimes I'd climb up over a tree-covered ridge, taking it slow and disappearing for a while. Nothing happened; as Nordic skiing, it was moderately interesting, and as job performance, it was a flat zil.

Another satellite gap pa.s.sed quietly as I climbed over one of those ridges; nothing happened during that time except that I really had to poke around to find a way up, after discovering a big brush-fall in my path. From the top I did a big series of slow, graceful turns, killing time to throw his rhythm off. Maybe I threw it off so far that he never saw me at all, or wasn't there, I thought to Resuna.

Resuna instantly pointed out that I was playing all the odds right and my job was to keep doing that; success would come eventually. I told it I felt like I was running Reader's Digest instead of Resuna.

I had another cup of tomato soup. It's the most wonderful food there is, if you're skiing XC all daya-hot water, salt, sugar, and a few vitamins and some flavor, all the essentials and nothing superfluous.

By the time I hit the third satellite gap, I was starting to feel like the characters in the old flatscreen movies who say to each other, solemnly, that it's "quiet. Yeah. Too quiet." I wasn't far from where I'd found his trail the first day. Still no sign of him. Maybe he was off doing whatever it is that cowboys do when they aren't stealing from society, terrorizing homeowners, raping little girls, interfering with ecological reconstruction, and congratulating themselves on what fine free people they are because they don't have a copy of Resuna to tell them that they're acting badly. Maybe he was around the next bend.

Adding to a sense of security that I knew to be false, the sun had burned through the nimbus layer, which had retreated rapidly to the east, leaving flocks of big thin mare's-tail cirrus scattered across the sky. The mare's-tails had chased after the nimbus in turn, and now the late afternoon sky was perfectly clear and blue; the sun was warming things up quickly; and at this very tail end of the afternoon, it was turning into a day I could enjoy.

I was beginning to feel a certain affection for Lobo, anyway. He'd given me an excuse to be back out here, in this season, after all these years. Now and then I heard a thundering crash, as the little-added warmth undid some of the last-formed January's ice. Two ravens flew urgently, black shadows moving in straight lines against the perfect blue, wasting no time, because the carrion they eat is scattered and rare, winter kill that might be buried at any moment by another snowfall. Thanks to Lobo, I was getting one more look at it all.

I stopped all to watch a bunch of big, thick icicles that had probably been growing in the depression in the cliff face since November, dripping in the sunlight, dropping water back into the little hot spring that had sp.a.w.ned them; it hissed now and then as a cold drop found a spot of hot rock. A little stream of steam rose from the spring and enveloped the icicles, but it looked to me like the sun was sweeping away the steam for the most part, and the icicles must be losing more to their dripping than they were gaining from condensation. The real widespread riot of life that is Rocky Mountain spring was still three months away, but the living things were joining the resistance against winter everywhere.

Another bend brought me to a place where an elk herd had crossed; I stopped to have some coffee, being profligate with rations now that I had less than an hour to go back to camp. One set of very big tracks, three running to average, and one average set where the feet all came down closer together than they did in the othersa-looked like a bull, three cows, and a yearling. Probably the same ones I'd seen drinking from Dead Mule Creek the day before.

The wind had died down. Other than the gurgle of coffee in my throat, and a far off flump from snow falling off trees now and then, there wasn't a sound. I might have stepped, for that moment, into a photograph. I looked up at the snow reflecting off the glaciers on the peaks, and thought that I'd have plenty of time to return to the shelter. My thigh muscles were hot from the exertion, but not in pain; the only part that hurt was the part that always does, my arches and instepsa-there's something about the motion of skiing that just works those muscles harder than anything else, and I hadn't been on skis enough in the last few years to build the right muscles. It wasn't agony; just an annoying ache that made me look forward to taking aspirin before dinner, with maybe some wine to wash it down, and rubbing my legs with an a.n.a.lgesic ointment before bed.

Well, since home was close, and now that the coffee had put more heart and attention in me, it was probably time to get going again. I pushed off and got into a nice big, slow skating motion, mostly keeping the poles tucked.

A shape didn't quite work, but almost should have, in the bushes to the left of the trail up aheada-a human shape, lying down. His cammies were just slightly off, maybe, for the dirt he was lying on, or he was stretched out just a hair too much and the line of him against the line of the bush didn't look right, or something like that. You can't always explain how you know. The figure stretched out p.r.o.ne on the frozen mud of a windswept bare patch, among all that gray-green crunchy, broken sage, was undoubtedly a man.

I kept skiing, just as I had been, though I felt like rough hands were squeezing my bowels. Right now I knew he was there, he knew I was here, and I was one bare point up on him because I knew that he knew. He could take a shot at me from this distance, but if he did, the IR signature to the overhead satellite would give One True an exact fix on his location, and he had no way to know that I didn't have a dozen backups waiting to jump in. In less than three minutes, there'd be the third and final satellite gap of the day, but I didn't know whether he knew that, or had a way to know that, or cared. Regardless of whether he knew or cared or not, I didn't want to move into his ambush just as my communications with the outside world went dead.

I couldn't even be sure that he had seen me, either. He hadn't moved a hair since I showed up. In my last remaining instant of satellite time before the gap, I called in a wide-angle image that covered a square kilometer centered on me over the last thirty seconds, zoomed onto him, blew it up, and saw that he hadn't moved at all for the whole time.

I slipped off the road and behind a big heap of rocks, figuring I might as well try something. People have been known to fall asleep on watch. Just maybe that had happened, or he had zoned out one way or another. Maybe he was lying there with his eyes shut, and had not yet seen me at all. If and when he awoke, or opened his eyes, probably in just a few minutes, he'd see my tracks. But it was just possible that if I skied down the steep slope to my lefta-flas.h.i.+ng through his field of vision for a few secondsa-I could get behind a little crag that stuck out of the hillside there, scoot around it like a bunny, climb up the other side, and have him from behind. And if he did wake up and saw my tracks, I figured he wouldn't have time to move into any new ambush position; he'd have to either run, or slug it out from where he was.

I pushed off down the steep slope, going as fast and straight as I could, to minimize my exposure.

I bounded over a couple of b.u.mps that hadn't been visible beneath the thick layer of powder, used them to change direction so that I'd present a somewhat worse target, and picked up as much speed as I could, the skis bouncing around on the edge of getting away from me.

Normally, out in backcountry like this, to be safe, I'd have snowplowed down a slope like this, ski tips close together, trailing edges splayed, digging in with my inner edges to slow down, so that I'd have more control; but normally in backcountry the risk is twisting an ankle, not getting shot. I was going down this slope like an old-time b.u.mp skier used to go down the trashed-out prepared slopes, just as if this had been a carefully groomed safe area, with a rescue crew standing by and the ski patrol watching. The skis slammed against yet another b.u.mp. My knees felt older than the rest of me.

For a moment, I was sliding sideways, just over the line into out of control. Then I got the uphill edges carving into the snow again, drove the pole in hard and reversed direction in a stem christie, and rocketed down the last part of the slope to slip behind that crag. I turned back and forth until I was practically snowplowing uphill, and finally finished up, grabbing a quick deep breath through my raised face screen, facing an empty hill. There had been no shot; without the satellite contact I had no way to know whether he had even moved. I felt blind.

Resuna informed me that I had fourteen minutes, twelve seconds to go until I'd be back on-line with the next satellite. That was too long to wait for Lobo to come creeping around looking for me, so I got busy. I pushed slowly downslope around the crag, taking a couple of minutes about it, sticking as close as I could to the rock face to make my tracks less apparent and keep closer to cover; some of these cowboys were so primitive, back in the old days, that they had been using old pure-projectile rifles without augmented sighting, hypervelocity, or homing ammunition.

On one occasion I remembered, a cowboy had caught Sue D'Alessandro in the open and taken four shots at her without hitting her. That failed to cheer me. For all I knew, Lobo might have stolen good modern equipment.

I was still wondering why there had been no shots so far. Was he asleep? Had he had a heart attack while waiting for me up there? I wished I had an infrared shot from the satellite.

By the time I reached the bottom of the crag, I was crouched low and just barely gliding along, getting steadily more nervous. Resuna had started to chatter, trying to cheer me up, and I'd had to tell it to shut up, and let me have my whole mind to think with. The slope down to the creek below me was streaked with the blue shadows of the scattered trees and snowdrifts, reaching far across the glaring white. In less than ten minutes I would have satellite coverage again.

Trying to make haste slowly, I got off the snow onto some sheltered gravel and took a full minute to reset my flexis, putting them into the snowshoe configuration. It drained the stored power in my suit considerably, but with luck this whole thing would be settled in the next twenty minutes, and besides, I would be putting out a heavy load of body heat soon enough, which would get me recharged.

I stepped onto the snow; I hadn't let the flexi cool enough after reconfiguring, and it was hot enough to flash some of the snow to steam. The loud hiss and puff of vapor startled me, and I said "s.h.i.+t," perfectly audibly. If the burst of steam and the bang hadn't given me away already, surely my voice had.

With cover blown, speed was all I hada-and maybe unpredictability. I kicked off the flexis, dumped my pack, drew my tranquilizer gun, and set about climbing up over the crag, coping with an unfamiliar surface smeared with snow and ice, with a mixture of rotten stone. That first face was about twelve feet high, broken and irregular enough to be feasible for three-pointing, but not at all easy, and I was feeling the effects of the long day.

Still, nothing happened; no shot whizzed by, or pocked the rocks, or stung me. No one shouted. When I looked out at the rough, snow-covered slope, which I did in every spare second, I saw nothing moving and I might as well have been all alone.

After that first face, the upper part of the crag was a tumble of boulders, which I could scramble over on all fours, staying as low as I could, off the skyline. It was still a terribly long way to the top, and if Lobo came around, I was going to be a sitting duck up here on the rocks. I kept pus.h.i.+ng and I have to admit that I was starting to feel the first nasty whispers of panic; Resuna moved in to soothe that.

Less than five minutes after having stupidly let off that puff of steam and given my position away, I was ready to poke my head out and take a look toward the brushy up slope above, where I had first seen Lobo. I drew a deep breath and let Resuna have its full effect, calming and preparing me; this was frightening, and I needed the clear head that Resuna could give me.

When I peered over the edge of the rocks, he was in exactly the same position. I raised my head further, and still he did nothing. He was still out of tranquilizer-gun range, so I couldn't just put a shot into him.

I adjusted the sun filter on my face mask and kicked up magnification. He was propped on his elbows in the snow; no one could possibly put both elbows down into snow like that, in a jacket that wasn't heated, and stay in that position for as long as he had; your hands would go to sleep and you wouldn't be able to grip anything, not to mention the excruciating pain after a while. I couldn't see his face because of the way his Stetson covered it, and all I could see of one hand wasa-what?

I notched magnification still further and zoomed in for a better look. That hand was oddly undetailed: perfectly smooth, without hairs, any unevenness in skin color, or wrinkles, and its shape was long and delicate, like a female modela-or an old-type clothing-store mannequina- I felt the terrible blow to the back of my head, and my eyes blurred and stung. Pure training and instinct made me try to roll over. I got onto my side, curling to protect my gut. I had just time to see a boot heel at the center of the crazy star of my shattering face-screen. I sucked in a breath, trying to get my arms and legs to answer me, before a second blow to the back of my head drove my broken face-screen forward into the snow. As the darkness smeared across my vision, and a big chunk of broken face-screen forced its way into my mouth and onto my tongue through my sore teeth and bruised lips, I could taste the icy tang of snow mixed with mud.

<> When I woke up, the only thing that I could remember with any certainty was that someone had given me soup one or more times during the indefinite period while my mind endlessly repeated a few disconnected, frightening imagesa-things that floated in out of a dark, noisy void, then drifted back out. I had little idea where my body had been going or what it had been doing while my mind was bouncing aimlessly through the void.

I had been eating soup. Someone had fed it to me. I remembered the soup because I had been so embarra.s.sed about throwing it up on myself, and on the hand and arm of the person feeding me.

That was another clue. I realized that I remembered big, gentle hands cleaning me off, and then more dreams in which I wandered down trails in dark forestsa-not the friendly, familiar night forest in which I had spent much of my working life, where I knew what everything was and could savor the sounds and smells, but the terrifying confusion of the forests of childhood nightmares.

But now I was definitely sliding back into the real world, and I didn't remember what I had been doing when I had left. The immediate environment in which I had been sleeping was chilly, but I was warm under covers. That brought back another memory: sometimes a soft, warm male voice urged me to crawl out of the covers, across a rough, cold floor, and use a chamber pot. Afterwards the same strong, weather-roughened hands that fed me would clean me up before putting me back to bed.

Now that I was aware of what had been going on and what I had been doing, I was also aware that the same events had been repeating for a while; I think I must have been given broth, and thrown it up, at least three times, perhaps more. Well, continuity of memory is one of the signs of recovering brain function, and to judge from the pain in the back of my scalp and the dull ache in the middle of my head, I must have had a pretty severe blow to the head.

I asked Resuna what had happened and what I should do.

Resuna wasn't there.

I was so frightened, and so shocked, that I fainted. When I woke again, I reached for Resuna, and it still wasn't there. I thought about pulling the covers aside and looking around me, but that seemed like too much work, and I was already tired from worrying about where Resuna had gone. I let myself fall asleep again.

I'm not sure how many more intervals of lucidity like that I had in the next hours or days. Eventually I woke up and saw some light and heard some noise. The presence of reality was almost as comforting as the presence of Resuna would have been, and later, when I ate, the world seemed almost normal.

It was still a very long, indeterminate timea-I'd have guessed at least two or three more daysa-until I was conscious for any period longer than five minutes at a time. When a brain takes a hard blowa-and a mind loses its controlling memea-it takes days or even weeks for anything beyond the most basic functions to be restored. By the point where I remembered the last few days, and realizing that I must be still up in the mountains, my time sense was coming back, so that I was beginning to group my experiences into day and night. For some stretch of time, Loboa-I had realized that I must be his prisonera-would go in and out frequently, about one errand or another. Probably I was lying in an important work or living area of his. Then the lights would be off and Lobo wouldn't come; that must be the time while he slept. Most likely were that "Lobo active, lights on" versus "Lobo absent, lights off" corresponded to day and nighta-I just didn't know which went with which.

One day the soup was good but differenta-I found chunks of meat, jackrabbit I thought, plus bits of wild greens that he must have gathered and dried, and a flavor I finally identified as canned stewed tomatoes. With irradiation and non-reacting containers, canned stuff was good for centuries, so it wasn't surprising that it was edible, but it was surprising that somewhere he had acquired several years' stock of it. That information was vitala-it helped to explain how a man could be living off the land in the high Rockies and not come down with scurvya-but there was no Resuna to upload the information to One True.

After a while I was able to look around and see the room. It was a refinished cave, probably an old earthquake crack or maybe an old mine shaft, and the part I could see was pritnear ten meters long by three high by four wide, quite a big s.p.a.ce. Iron pipes gurgled all around the walls, and when I put a hand on one next to the bed it was very warm, though not hot enough to burn. That answered one riddle: he was keeping his place warm with a combination of good insulation and water from some hot spring, and it wasn't visible to a satellite because it looked like every other hot spring.

The walls were lined with forty-year-old canned goods, all with that silly "atom" sign that meant that they had been irradiateda-in the old days, when people were allowed to have any old set of irrational fears they wanted to, with no Resuna to keep them in tune with reality, so many people had been afraid of irradiated food that the government had required those labelsa-I guess so that people could avoid clean, safe irradiated food and enjoy stuff that might be spoiled or contaminated instead. Nowadays the food was exactly as safe as it had ever been, and Resuna kept you from worrying.

Any place on the wall where there wasn't a shelf of food, there were portraits of people. Out of habit, I reached for Resuna to tell me who they were. Once again, I was all alone in my mind. I pulled the covers over my head, curled up tightly, and went back to sleep.

When I woke again, my eyes were focusing, my head ached only slightly, I could form more or less coherent thoughts, and Resuna was still not there. For the first time in a long time I had had many hours of real sleep, not the torment of half-waking nightmares. Almost, if I hadn't felt so lonely in the absence of Resuna, I'd have been comfortable.

Lobo came in, looked at me for a moment, and something must have been different in my facial expression. "I did hit the back of your head hard enough to kill any normal person," he said, with what sounded like mild frustration, "I'm sure of it. But I guess you're a hardheaded man, Currie Curran, and even though by all rights you ought to have a fractured skull, all you got was a concussion." He looked intently into my eyes, as if he thought I might explain what had gone wrong; after a breath, he said, "Looks like you're feeling better."

"You're Lobo," I said, unable to think of anything any smarter to say.

"Stupid name I gave myself when I was just a kid," he said, obviously embarra.s.sed. "I guess I'm lucky I didn't end up as the Masked Avenger or something. My real name is Dave Singleton, if you want to use it." He was carrying something under his arm, and when he brought it closer, I saw he had a loaf of fresh bread, a cutting board, and a knife. "You going to be reasonable, Curran, and not go grabbing for the knife? If you say yes, we can share this while it's warm."

"Deal."

He sat down and sawed off a couple big slices, handing them to me. They tasted wonderful. He cut a couple for himself, ate quietly for a while, then said, "Funny thing. You might say I'm the reason for your existence. I'm the last cowboy, at least I think, and therefore, Curran, you're the last cowboy hunter. But then if you weren't hunting me, I'd just be a d.a.m.ned eccentric living out in the woods, so I guess you're the reason why I'm a cowboy, at least as much as I'm the reason why you're a cowboy hunter."

I let what he had said lay there between us. Too much response, too soon, kills most people's urge to talk, and I needed to learn many things that I'd only get if he told me.

I wanted to know why I was still alive; if he had been able to bring me back here, to nurse me back to life, he could just as easily have carried me far enough away so that my transponder wouldn't lead people to his hiding place, say to some stretch of thin ice on a mountain lake. Then he could have filled my outside suit with rocks and pushed me under. Probably n.o.body would ever have found me, and I'd just be another one of those hunters that disappeared during a satellite blackout. In the condition I'd been in, I'd never've even known he was doing it.

So why hadn't he? I could think of absolutely nothing that a cowboy would want with a living cowboy hunter. He ought to knowa-would know, to have survived so longa-that because the individual parts of One True are nothing, there is no point in trying to take one of them hostage. One True will just lose the part, direct the individual copies of One True to comfort the mourners, and go on.

After a long while of just sitting together, during which he said nothing and I said nothing, I was unable to think of a more subtle approach, so I just asked, "Why didn't you kill me, Dave?"

The big man shrugged. "Well, I guess I had a bunch of reasons, but none of them sound all that good to me right now. Probably I'm just being stupid and acting contrary to my own interests. Most likely it's because I've got this great big phobia: I'm real, real, real afraid of dying by being hurt so bad I can't take care of myself, and starving or freezing a short way from home. It's what all my nightmares are about, and whenever something goes wrong, or I get sick or have a near-miss accident, it's the first thing I worry about.

"So I'd just hit you real hard and you weren't moving, and I checked you for a pulse, and d.a.m.n, you had one. Well, I could've just pulled the electrets out of your suit, opened the heat reservoirs, and left you to freeze. I could have gone real low tech and cut your throat. Either of those would have made perfect sense. Instead I looked down at you and said to myself, he's going to die here, helpless with no one to find him. I can't just leave him.

"Well, I told myself I was just being silly and sentimental, but once I had let myself feel that I couldn't leave you to die in the snow far away from any help, the feeling carried over, I guess I'd have to say, to other ideas, so that I also felt funny about banging your head with that log again. Once you start caring how you kill somebody, I guess, you're already starting to think about not killing them, if you see what I mean, anda-there I was. The moment was past. The blood was cold. I plain old flat out couldn't do it, at least not out there in the snow, far away from help or friends, where you might never be found. Not right there and then, anyway, not unless I really had to.

"Now, mind you, I might still take you out and slit your throat, later, but if I do, it'll be quick and clean, and you won't just lie there dying for hours, and I'll put you someplace where they'll find you and your family and friends won't have to wonder what happened. I haven't entirely made up my mind on that."

I kept my expression as neutral as I could, just like they taught us in training. "I see your problem, Dave. Is there anything I can do to, uh, influence this decision?" I was desperately trying to cue up Resuna for advice, but Resuna remained absent.

"No," Lobo said. "You can try but I'm not sure the ideas you'd have to use, and think of, would come naturally to you. How many years have you been running Resuna?"

"Twenty-six years next November, but, uh, I don't think I'm running Resuna right now."

Lobo looked at me curiously. "That was the impression I had, but I wasn't sure how to ask you. Usually Resuna has more options than the native personality, and it can recover faster; I expected to talk to Resuna whenever you finally came around, and to have to ask it to let me talk to you. But a you mean it's quiet in your head? n.o.body in there but you, listening or talking?"

I shrugged. "I can remember Resuna's voice, but I can't seem to get it back. And I've been trying for a while, so it's not some temporary thing."

"Interesting. Who'd've thought a cowboy hunter, of all people, would be a good candidate for dememing? More bread?"

"Sure. You're a good cook."

"Not much else to do out here but please myself, and I'm sort of a fussy guy, or I was in the old days." He cut me off another chunk; I ate it more slowly than the last, savoring how good it was. I reflexively reached to store the experience with Resuna, and again it wasn't there.

Davea-I was starting to think of him as that, rather than Loboa-was staring at me, obviously curious, tugging at his lower lip with its few days stubble of beard. His hands were clean, though heavily callused, and his trimmed-short fingernails had no dirt under them. "You just tried to call up Resuna, again, didn't you?"

"Yeah," I admitted, seeing no reason to lie about it. "Every couple of minutes, I forget that I have this problem, and reach for Resuna, the way your tongue looks for a missing tooth. And every time I reach for Resuna, it's not there at all. Nothing like the temporary weird feeling when my copy is being replaced, and for a couple of hours I can't connect to it easily, and the new copy isn't yet using the old memories effectivelya-that's still Resuna, just Resuna that's hard to reach. This is just as if it had never been there." I ate another couple of bites. "What did you mean when you said I was a good candidate for a dememing, was that the word?"

"That was the word," he agreed. "Now and again, you know, people do get rid of a meme, or lose one, or it gets knocked out of them somehow. In the old days some of the cowboys were just people who woke up one day with Resuna not running, and they'd slip away and come join us. I don't imagine that's what very many people did. I'd bet that most people reacted the way you've been doing, so that soon as they woke up with Resuna not there, they called up One True on a computer or via some friend, to get another copy loaded in. But a few people would suddenly just not have a working copy of Resuna, and wouldn't want another one, and those people would run off to become cowboys.

"Anda-this wasn't so much the way it was with Resuna as it was with some of the older memesa-sometimes you could trick a meme out of people's heads. Sometimes the drugs they used to use on mental patients would work, and sometimes shock, like an electric shock, or a big dose of insulin, or a blow to the head. Which I guess is how you got dememed. So what's it feel like to not have Resuna in your head?"