Century Next Door - Candle Part 4

"Don't you know? I mean, you never have had it, so you must know what it's like."

"Yeah, but what I'm asking you, or I guess what I should have asked you, is what does the change feel like? How's it different now from what it was before?"

I thought about it, taking my time. When a guy saves your life, and would have had every reason to just kill you, you owe him at least the courtesy of a good answer to his questions. I knew if I had been running Resuna, like normal, it would have had some very convincing argument against that feeling, but right now it was just me. After the long pause, I just said, "Oh, like, uh, it feels a bita-a little bita-like it used to feel before memes, when a friend would die or leave. All of a sudden there's somebody you keep wanting to talk to and can't, you know? Not too different froma" I stared at the blank rock wall opposite and let the thought form. "Not too different from waking up from a dream, calling for somebody you only knew in the dream, and then knowing they aren't there and can't be there."

Dave nodded. "Poetic." When I stared blankly at him, he said, "Well, that's one effect we've identified. Clearly being dememed makes people get poetic." He smiled, and I made myself smile back, though I wasn't sure that I had any sense of humor about that subject just then. After an awkward pause he added, "I got some coffee brewing, too, if you'd like some. Do I have to tie you up every time I leave the room?"

"I guess not. I wouldn't get far, naked, and I'm not stupid enough to try anything yet."

"Glad you put the *yet' in there," he said. "I'd have to be pretty d.a.m.n dumb to expect you not to lie to me, but I'd sure appreciate it if you don't lie to me more than you feel you have to, and if you don't let me catch you doing it too often."

I considered. "Why don't you just figure that I won't pa.s.s up any good chance for an escape, but I won't do any petty s.h.i.+t that just makes both of us uncomfortable? I'll lie if it'll help me get away, but not just to f.u.c.k with you."

"Deal. Let me go get that coffee. Bet you're tired of jackrabbit soup by now, too; in another hour I'll be done cooking up an elk loaf with some reconst.i.tuted potatoes."

My stomach rumbled and I said, "I think I can help you out with that. How many days have I not eaten solid food?"

"Since you got hit on the head," Dave said. "Sorry not to be able to tell you more than that, but it's always possible that you have a perfectly good copy of Resuna, and what's keeping Resuna from restarting itself, and turning you again, might be nothing more than having lost track of the timea-it does depend partly on that internal clock it creates inside you when it takes over. So, I can't answer that question."

I shrugged. "Well, anyway, I can tell it's been a long time, and I don't really have to have things more specific than that. And the food sounds wonderful."

Dave "went out to the kitchen, and I continued to sit on the bed, not really thinking of anything, just enjoying being awake and not feeling awful. There would be time enough for more advanced pleasures, later, perhaps, but right now sitting and waiting for a good meal, and being well again, was about all I needed.

When Dave came back with the coffee, which smelled so wonderful that I was beginning to wonder if he had been slipping You-4 into my soup (maybe because making me happy all the time would help keep me dememed? I didn't know a thing about how dememing workeda-hadn't even known it was possible until it happened to me), I had thought of another question to ask him. "How did you build this place? I know that sounds like a stupid question."

"Not really. What you want to know is how I got this place without tipping off the satellite, and the answer was good luck and patience. I found this old mine, a hundred yards from a hot spring, half-choked with dirt, and dug it out. I carried the dirt with me, on the regular rounds during the day, in a pack I made from a gunny sack with a few holes cut into it to let the dirt dribble out as I walked. It took a long time but I had a long time. The first couple of years I lived in a shelter like yours, basic military-surplus thing, under the overhang, where there was room to set it up. After two years of digging out a packload of dirt per day, I had a nice medium-sized room to live in. And now after a couple of decades, I've got a bigger house than I ever had back before I went off to be a cowboy. With ten years of a packload a day, if you're careful not to miss a day, you can have a pretty big hole."

"You're still digging?"

"It's something to do. I have a room in back that's going to be a warm, comfy library; it happened I found an old armchair that was in great shape, so that made me think how much I would enjoy just having that as my regular place to sit, enough to bother bringing it up here, but then I didn't exactly have the perfect place to put it. So I went looking for a rug to go with it, and a floor lamp, and when I had all of that, well, two bookcases fell into my hands, which was fate's way of telling me that that armchair needed a library to be in. And I already had some books. All this finding stuff and figuring out what to do with it was all across a number of years, mind you, while I was still digging out the hot-tub room, so I had lots of time to do my planning."

"A hot tub?"

"Well, I've got hot water, more than I can use. Might as well. Though I admit that I also use the tub for laundry, and dishes. Room in it, though, for three or four people to soak; I just like having the room. Anyway, once I got the tub room done, it was time to start on the library. Figure another two years and that'll be done as well, which will be good. I ain't as young as I used to be, and a warm place with good light to read by is starting to seem more and more important, as I think about what kind of a setup would be best for a rickety old man."

I looked at him intently for a minute, and then finally blurted out, "Jeez, I can see why you'd need to plan for when you're old, but you don't look a day older than when I thought I'd sent you over the cliff."

He laughed. "Well, you look awful good for an old fart of your age, Curran. Especially for one who was in a dangerous occupation for a long time. People living a long time and people looking younger than they are, are things that happen, you know, with better medical treatment and all."

"I guess so," I said. I didn't believe him. In the first place, except for his recent foray into rape and robbery, Dave hadn't had access to much of that medical technology, nor could he have had much in the last fifteen or twenty years.

Also, he was exaggerating about how well preserved I was. I could tell you ten things that are different in my appearance, now, from what it was ten years ago: more pounds in bad places, less hair in good places, some lines and wrinkles. Dave, on the other hand, looked exactly the way he had looked when I had last seen him in the flesha-better, in fact, since now he wasn't tired out by a long chase. Somehow nothing had happened to his face or body at all. My degree of preservation might have been mildly interesting in our present world full of well-preserved old guys; but his was dead solid freakish. That he was trying to conflate the two suggested that he was un.o.bservant (unlikely, in someone who had survived so long out here) or more likely that he was trying to put one over on me (very likely, in a cowboy).

I thought about pressing the point, but either he was telling the truth (and there was nothing more to tell) or he was lying (and wasn't about to tell me), and what he would say would be the same either way.

So I changed the subject. "And have you been living on canned goods and hunting all this time?"

"If you're a decent hunter and there's just one of you in a wilderness area, it isn't that hard to keep yourself fed. Didn't even have to work that hard. The canned stuff is good for the things I can't grow, but I grew some of my own stuff too. I'd plant vegetables on hillsides under upside-down aquariums, which make perfect ready-to-go coldframesa-I raided a couple of old pet stores in Gunnison and Montrose for those. My plantings were too small to show much from orbit, as long as I kept them scattered out pretty wide, which meant I'd have to do some walking, but I had time to do it. Now and then a deer would smell something it wanted and knock over an aquarium, or a gopher or rabbit would tunnel in for it, but not as often as you'd think, because herbivores basically aren't too smart, and my growing sites were so scattered that if they raided one aquarium and figured out how to do that, by the time they ran into another one, like as not they had forgotten. And I could combine making the rounds of my aquariums with my hunting. Even doing all that stuff, I had plenty of time to dig and think. It's been lonely work, hard work, but it ain't worn me down yet."

I shrugged. "It might even be why you still look so young," I said, hoping to keep him thinking I was believing him. "Abundant exercise and a good diet, far away from all the places where there are leftover plagues from the warsa-probably a healthier life than I've been leading." I took another sip of coffee. "This is as good as I get at home. Reconst.i.tuted?"

"Yeah, I stole a reconst.i.tutor a while back."

That reminded me, for the second time in a few minutes. Since I couldn't afford to offend him, I did my best to repress a shudder.

All the same, he must have seen the change at once. "What is it?"

I don't usually like to pick a fight with my host, and I was naked, disarmed, and completely at his mercy. Plus we'd already had a theoretical discussion about his cutting my throat. But the unfortunate habit of a lifetimea-saying whatever popped into my heada-caused me to blurt, "When I was prepping for this mission, One True took me through Kelly's memory, and all I can saya-" I stared at him and tried to reconcile this soft-spoken, seemingly gentle man with Kelly's vision of him bouncing on top of her and laughing at her cries of pain and fear "a-s.h.i.+t, I don't know what to say. How could you do a thing like that to a little girl, and her mother?"

He looked puzzled and said, "I didn't have much choice; they'd caught Nancy a long time back, even before your group caught up with me, and once they found out she was a cowboy's wife, they really poured on the Resuna copies until she was completely theirs. And Kelly never had a chancea-she was probably given her first copy of Resuna before she was three years old. But you know what Robert Frost saida-home is where, when you've gotta go there, they'll have to take you ina-and I was good and sick, so I paid them the visit. I was d.a.m.n lucky to get away, and even luckier that I could dememe them long enough to have my chance to say h.e.l.lo to my wife and daughter; there are days when I feel like, now that I've done that, I can die easier."

I was staring at him now, unable to believe what was either an audacious lie, or a the thought connected. "You mean you not only raped that poor child, but she was your own daughter?"

Now he was staring. If there'd been a third person there cruel enough to laugh, he'd probably have busted a gut at the spectacle of two men who had suddenly dropped their brains on the floor and didn't have anything with which to think of picking them up. Finally, he sputtered, "What the f.u.c.k are you talking about, you crazy f.u.c.king idiot?"

I was not used to being called a crazy f.u.c.king idiota-with everyone running Resuna, profanity and insult are both very rarea-but despite being startled, I could see that he was pretty stressed. And I knew that this wasn't a turn the conversation should have taken, but h.e.l.l if I saw any way out but forward. "That's what was in her memory," I said. "I played through the whole memory copy, and believe me, I'd rather not have, and I wish like all s.h.i.+t that she didn't have that memory, but she does. You came in with a guna-the poor kid had never even seen one before, do you realize how much innocence you were spoiling?a-you threatened them into giving you medicine and food and their reconst.i.tutor, and then you made that little girl watch while you raped her mom, and then you raped her. That's what she remembers. And thanks to the transference from One True, I remember every bit of it, and you better believe I wish I didn't. Now you tell me that was your wife and daughter that you did that to. Well, ek-f.u.c.king-scuse me, and I guess now you'll kill me for saying it, but out of all the dirty, vicious, hate-filled cowboys I've ever hunted, you are the only one I've ever really despised." It was about there that I noticed I was shouting into his face, standing over him where he sat on his stool, fists on my hips like I was going to yell him into submission, with some of the effect spoiled by the fact that I was buck-naked.

Dave stared into s.p.a.ce. If I'd had pants to throw on and a weapon to hand, I could have taken him right then, right there, without much difficulty, I'm sure. As I watched, a tear ran down his cheek. "You d.a.m.n well ought to be crying," I said.

He wiped his eyes, stared at me, and said, "Of course you believe that memory."

"What are you going to try to do, pull some Freud-bulls.h.i.+t and tell me she wanted to remember something like that, and made it up?"

He shook his head slowly. "Curran, I don't have a d.a.m.n idea in my head for how to tell you this so you'll believe it, buta hey, did you ever meet Kelly? Or just that copy of her memory?"

"Well, of course I just got the copy of her memory! What would you think? One True never inflicts unnecessary pain. It wasn't going to make her sit there and tell me all about it. Not when her copy of Resuna could just load the memory up to One True, and my copy could load it down to me, and I would know what had happened to Kelly far more vividly than she could ever have told it, and with no pain to her. Why would we need to meet face-to-face?"

He shrugged, got up, seemed about to speak, stopped himself, looked down at the floor, visibly got himself under control, and started to pace, gulping at his coffee, as if the solution to some hard problem might be anywhere on the floor if he could just find it.

Finally he looked up; the whole silent performance had taken over a minute, and I didn't believe any of it; he'd had days to plan whatever he was going to say now.

"You ought to ask," he said, "why your only access was that copied memory. Couldn't her copy of Resuna have just taken control, so that you could have met her face-to-face? Wouldn't you have had a stronger feeling if you had really known Kelly instead of just importing that one memory? Wouldn't that have motivated you more, if you had looked into her eyes and promised her you'd catch the a.s.shole rat-b.a.s.t.a.r.d that did that?"

"Might have," I admitted.

"So, One True can do d.a.m.n near anything and it couldn't do that for you?"

"It might have hurt hera-"

"A conversation? Even though it might be emotionally painful for her, it couldn't be as painful as what had already happened. And One True could erase her memory of the conversation easily enough, if it needed to. h.e.l.l, it gave Nancy a whole set of imaginary memories about being with squatters in Vegas Ruin, and being a slave there, to replace our marriage. You should've seen how bewildered she was when I dememed her and she suddenly knew who I wasa-and who she wasa-again! One True could have let you talk to Kellya-should have and would havea-if the memory that was copied to you was accurate. Even if it had hurt Kelly at the time, her copy of Resuna could control and erase the pain as necessary. And meanwhile you'd have been just that much more motivated, and she'd have had the comfort of knowing someone was going out there to catch me. If One True was telling you the truth, if I had really done those things to her, then that was what it should have done, and if it knows us as well as it says it does, it would have done it."

"But I felt her personality," I said. "Real and human and twelve years old, not the kind of thing that even One True could make upa-"

"Oh, I'm sure One True started with some memories from Kelly, when it created the one it gave you. Probably even copied over some bits and pieces from some adult woman who was raped as a childa-the War of the Memes went twenty years and sooner or later pritnear every girl and woman who had the bad luck to live in those years got serbed, so One True probably had a wide selection of rape memories."

"I never serbed anybody," I pointed out, "and I was in the War of the Memes."

"I was too, and I never serbed anybody either!" Dave said. He was glaring at me, dark eyes fierce under his bushy, unkempt brows.

"Until recently when it was your wife and daughter," I said, sneering, maybe hoping he'd just kill me.

"That's what I'm f.u.c.king telling you, Curran. The memory is false. One True probably started with some of Kelly's fear, from when I broke into the house, which it got via her copy of Resuna. Then it fused in a bunch of rape memories. You d.a.m.n well know that memes can create memories that you experience as reala-weren't you ever hit with Unreconstructed Catholic, or didn't you know someone who was? And don't you remember how everyone who ever ran Unreconstructed Catholic all remembered kindly Sister Agnes and lim koapy Father Jim from first grade at St. Aloysious School? And being their favorite and feeling secure and safe with the Church guarding you? Or Real America's memory of the Fourth of July when you were in eleventh grade and went to the high-school prom in Brightsburg, Vermont, with the red-haired girl that used to pitch for your Little League team? You know memes can make you remember things that didn't happen, dammit."

"They can" I said, "but One True doesn't. Never, never, never. It just helps you understand the memories you have. And anyway, One True isn't a single program dominating your brain; it's just what all the Resunas together make. Your individual Resuna is a much smaller program than the old memes, and it's just a helper for your own personality. It's not going to screw things up for you by making you remember things that didn't happena" My voice was getting softer and I was almost mumbling.

I hated the feeling and wished Resuna were here to help me, but it wasn't. Unfortunately I was realizing a couple of things. First of all, Resuna and the emergent version of One True were the most sophisticated and capable memes; it wasn't smaller because it had less power. Anything any other meme could do, One True could do, easily.

Then a rush of feeling and memory roared through my mind like white noise cranked to ear-bleeding volumes. I was remembering things that had been erased from my memory of my life with Mary, trivial stuff like little fights and moments of anger, that I was better off forgettinga-yet still they had happeneda-yet I was better off not rememberinga-yet-yet-yeta and simultaneously I felt an odd quality to my memories of Mary's love and support during my cowboy hunting daysa in fact she'd been very upset nearly all the times when I went out, and actually there were times when I came home and could tell that everything had just been cleaned and fixed up that minute, and really there was no Mary to talk to, just her Resuna, as if in reality it had been unable to make her function and had just grabbed control and straightened out a mess at homea I remembered her throwing the lamp at me the time she had yelled something about days spent in bed crying, and yet another memory seemed to try to crawl over it and say that she had told me that story about a time during the War of the Memes when she was a slave a and yet, ghosted over all that, images of my brave, supportive, smiling wife who could send me off to fight cowboys with the warm confidence that I would be back, with a total confidence and love.

Well, that had been very useful for One True to have me remember, hadn't it?

All of those thoughts and feelings rushed through my head in less time than it takes to think a single sentence in words. I hated Resuna, One True, Mary, the whole of my life, and Dave, not necessarily in that order. I hated myself for having lived for years that way. And most of all I hated the way that it seemed likely that Dave was right. "s.h.i.+t," I said, flatly. "s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t. You might as well make me the rest of your argument."

He shrugged. "You have the same expression in your eyes that Nancy did as she came out of it. Look, I don't think One True would have put that rape memory into Kelly; it made up the memory to show to you, but it put something different into her head. That's why it didn't set up for you to meet her. Probably it told her that she hid under the bed the whole time I was there, and maybe that I vandalized the place or threatened her. From One True's standpoint, that would make sensea-it wouldn't give her any more trauma than it had to for its purposes, so it gave her a false memory that would help her cope with the world she'll have to live in. Probably slightly painful but nothing she can't cope with. And I would bet that the false memory they gave her doesn't hurt as much as her few hours of knowing the truth and being herself did. But she did seem to like that little taste of freedom, even with the pain and all. Or maybe I'm just projecting because I wanted her to like them."

"Why would One True give somebody a false memory?" I asked. I was rummaging, hard, in my own memories, trying to get Resuna to come back; I felt so utterly defenseless without it, and I was sure that if only I had One True here, it would have a real answer to all these accusations. "And why should I trust you to be the one telling the truth?"

He looked so directly into my eyes that I sat down as if he had pushed me. For a moment, I wondered if this might not be some sort of hypnosis. "Look," he said. "You know the answer to that perfectly well, even if you don't want to admit it. One difference between me and One True is that I don't have a planet to run. And all those billions of copies of Resuna in everybody's brain are parts of One True. Now since the world began, people have been lying to themselves to get through their day, get through their joba-get through their life. How many people have gone to their graves thinking that the boss really valued them, or that they were better off not changing jobs, or that their mother cared about them, or that their children loved thema-when any objective observer could have seen it for pure bulls.h.i.+t? Sometimes it's just very useful to believe something that isn't true.

"And you don't care what your individual brain cells do or believe, except as it matters for your convenience, do you? If it makes you happy to have a few thousand of your brain cells think your wife is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, and respond to her like that, you don't necessarily want those cells to develop the objective opinion that she's actually much plainer than ordinary, do you? Aren't you better off having those deluded little cells in your head telling you different?

"Well, that's what One True needs from its component copies of Resuna, frequently. Much as I hate to defend it, One True's reasons for what it does are not necessarily bad or crazy. One of the troubles with fighting One True, psychologically, for every cowboy I ever knew who wasn't crazy, was thata-objectively speakinga-we had to admit that One True wasn't evil; oh, it had done some cruel stuff and it had fought the War of the Memes to win, and like that, but unlike so many of the other memes, One True was not out to enslave the human race to some ideal that was meaningful only to it, or force people into behaving according to some crazed code that was a bad parody of an extinct set of ideas, or any of that stuff. It really did intend to benefit human beings and the planet.

"When One True took over, a billion people worldwide were hungry even though there were more than resources enough to feed them; hundreds of disasters were going their way without interference, even though humanity had the brains and resources to control them; and everyone was in fear, even though the only thing they really had to fear was each other, and very few of them really wanted to hurt each other.

"One True gave everyone Resuna, and became what everyone neededa-something that would ensure that everyone put his whole heart into meeting the global crisis for the next few decades. Earth would be in worse shape without it." He was emphasizing his points as if trying to pound them into me; I couldn't imagine why a cowboy was talking like this.

"So, along the way, sometimes, One True needs an individual to believe something that isn't true. What if a woman wants a particular man, maybe one she got separated from during the War of the Memes, so much that she won't do her work in the farm or factory, and just wants to go looking for him? Resuna keeps the thought of him out of her mind until One True can learn if he's alive or dead, and if he's alive, maybe it's convenient for the Earth, and the whole project of saving the planet, to bring them back togethera-and maybe it's not. If it is, they get together and there's much rejoicing; if it's not, they don't, and their copies of Resuna keep them from feeling more than a trifling sadness now and then. Who's hurt?

"Or maybe a brother and sister both have genius-level talent for doing the math for the ecological computer models that One True needs them to do. Unfortunately, the brother molested the sister when she "was a little girl, and she's afraid of men, afraid of him, and too depressed and angry to do any work. Her copy of Resuna adjusts all that, and bingo, she's functional, she's not unhappy, she and the whole planet gain. Furthermore, his copy of Resuna adjusts him so that he won't do things like that anymore. He's not only happier, he's a much better person. And the math gets done, part of the Earth gets repaired, fewer children get hurt, and two people who would otherwise have been basket cases of one kind or another work happily side by side. Now who can argue with that? Might not be all that much justice to it but there's pritnear perfect mercy.

"So, Resuna needs to make sure that Kelly does not form any part of her ident.i.ty out of being a cowboy's daughter, and it really doesn't want her forming any ideas about rebellion or freedom or any of that, which young brainy people are very apt to do given half a chance. So instead it creates a memory that will be a barrier, forever, against that side of herself. The minute she thinks of things that are wild and free and uncontrolleda-like a cowboya-she thinks of how scared she was by me. And then Resuna comforts her and she doesn't feel so sad anymore, or hurt; all she feels is love and grat.i.tude for Resuna. And Resuna needs you to want to hunt me downa-so it gives you that gruesome memory and tells you it's Kelly's. The result is that Kelly grows up to be productive and happy, you catch the cowboy, and everyone is better off. Even the cowboy, who finally has his personality altered so that he can function in the real world. The false memories are good for her, good for you and me, good for One True, might even be good for the future of the planet. And if what you remember doesn't happen to be true, well, it's useful, isn't it?"

The strangest thing about it all, as he sat there and said that to me over our hot coffee, was that he not only didn't sound bitter or sarcastic, he sounded more as if he were just explaining, in a friendly way, to someone who didn't know, how the world worked. It was a good strategy, I realizeda-I wanted to believe him. And now that I was calming down, the thought no longer made me angry at Resuna or One True. I still wanted to get back as soon as I could. I just felt as if I weren't quite myself.

I sighed and asked, "How do I know, though, that you're telling me the truth?"

He shrugged. "You don't. That's what life was like before Resuna, and if I were still fighting to free the world from it, and I thought I could win, I'd say that's what life will be like after Resuna. One of the books I like to rereada-Forks in Time, even though I'm not cybertaoa-says *Certainty is a very overrated quality,' and it's got a point. But then Surfaces in Opposition says *Certainty is what most people prefer to truth, and it cannot be kept from them.' So you slice it whatever way you want, I guess."

I shuddered, feeling as cold as if I had rolled naked in the snow. "I can't seem to make my thoughts come together, at all. And I don't mean to be rude, but I feel incredibly tired."

He nodded. "Well, just making a guess, I'd say that since you've just had an exhausting physical injury, your first good meal in a long time, and a whole big set of emotional shocks, you probably need to sleep. Let's put you to beda-I hope you won't resent that I have to lock the doora-and when you're awake again, we can talk more. For right now, I don't have any reason to do anything except feed you and keep you here, till I make up my mind what's to be done."

As soon as he mentioned the idea of sleeping, I realized I'd never heard a more attractive idea. And who could say? Maybe I'd get Resuna back after some more normal sleep, or come up with an idea for escaping and contacting the authorities a or I'd feel more sure that Dave was right, and then do somethinga-the lights went out, I heard the lock turning, and I was asleep.

When I woke up, I remembered everything, and got up and carefully made my way to the light switch. I used the chamber pot, and wondered if perhaps I could get a sponge bath or the use of the hot tub soon, because I had spent enough time in a too-warm bed to be pretty rank.

Resuna was still gone, and the ghosted-over memories felt more false; you don't remember a thing as vividly when there isn't a voice in your mind insisting that you do.

There was a knock at the door, and I said, "Sure, come in."

"Saw the light on," Dave said. "You've slept from meal to meal; you want to come out and eat again, and maybe talk some more?"

We'd about finished eating when he said, "Well, I don't know exactly how to put this, Curran, so let me just say it, and say I'm sorry to have to think about this. Now that you're so much better, I'm going to have to decide what to do with you. I like having somebody to talk to, and there'd be room for two here, so if it was just you and me, I'd invite you to be my roommate and that would be all there'd need to be. However, there's a whole big planet out there, and by spring at latest there's going to be another manhunt for me, and I can't afford to have a house guest who's on the other side, if you see what I mean. Nor can I let you goa-your copy of Resuna already uploaded enough to One True to give the hunters a much better chance of catching me, and what you know now would pretty much zero them in on this place, so I want the time to move my things and start over somewhere else. I'm way too old to run out in the middle of the night, sleep in trees for a year, and start all over from my skivvies again.

"So, little as I like it, I have to figure you're getting stronger every day and pretty soon locking you in a bedroom won't stop you, or even deter you. And once that's truea-which might be tomorrow for all either of us knowsa-well, then my two choices seem to be to enlist you, or to kill you."

"Uh a how do you mean, enlist me?"

"Partner up. Work together. Not really for the causea-I'm not at war with One True anymore, except so far as it's at war with mea-but just to live free out here. I know it's not much to offer but I wanted to have some alternative to killing you; I'm really soft these days, or something, because I could have just walked right in there and done it while you were asleep, and you'd've never known. Anyway, it didn't seem fair to just sit here, making small talk with you, and not have you know that that's what's going on in my mind."

He looked as embarra.s.sed as a teenage boy proposing marriage to the girl next door. In slightly different circ.u.mstances I'd probably have laughed. As it was, feeling stupid, I said, "I understand your situation, and I understand that it's nothing personal, and all that. You aren't going to kill me right now if I say no, are you?"

"You haven't said whether you want to take my offer."

"Will you trust me if I say yes?"

"Guess that's up to me." He sighed. "Let's fix a big pot of coffee and go sit in the hot tub. We can talk for a while about any old thing, and maybe if I put the decision off long enough, I'll think of something else, or you'll decide you'd rather live free, or something." He got up from the table. "How are you feeling?"

"Pretty well mended," I admitted. "Resuna's still gone. I don't seem to miss it quite as much as I did at first, but if I said I didn't miss it, I'd be lying."

The reconst.i.tutor pingeda-he had some "refrigerator art" pinned to it, and he grinned and said, "Kelly's, of course. Nancy gave it to me. All except this one that Kelly drew for me, herself, right then."

I looked at it and was startled by memory, again. Kelly's drawings were good first-and second-grade arta-basic realism, shading, stuff that looked son of ordinarya-but I remembered, then, that "Kid pictures didn't used to look like this. This is like something a talented fifteen-year-old might have done in the old days. How is it that now all children do this kind of thing at six?"

He shrugged. "Resuna pleases people as much as it can. Small children really want to draw realistically, it's just that the parts of the brain that they need for the process haven't grown in yet. So what Resuna does is, it takes control of the eye and the hand and draws for the kid, copying skills from more experienced artists. Eventually the skills do download, which is why everyone can draw really well nowadays. See, in the one picture she drew while she was free, it's supposed to be a picture of me, but you can see where the skills weren't all there and she had trouble integrating things; I think it looks sort of cubist."

"Well, you don't have five eyes, or two mouths, so I guess I agree," I said. "And I can see some of the cowboy viewpoint, I admit. With Resuna she draws better than she ever could by herself, but just like everybody else. This picture is the only one that's completely hera-"

"Or completely Kelly except for the parts of her that Resuna had already shaped so strongly that she really can't be separated from it," Dave said. "Just like the parts of her mother and her cla.s.smates that they mainly got from Resuna. Anyway, the coffee's done; if you'll carry a couple of cups, the hot-tub room is right through here."

The tub was an old twentieth-century model with none of the valves or hardware; he had set it up with a pipe running in at one end and a slightly lower pipe at the other, so that water from the hot spring flowed through continuously. I dipped my hand in; it was at a comfortable temperature. "Pour the coffee," Dave said, undressing.

I did, and set the pot and cups within easy reach of the tub.

"Well, let's get in," he said. As we settled ina-the clean warm water felt wonderfula-and each got our coffee, I said, "You know, if I do throw in with you, and we have to run, I'm going to miss this."

He grinned. "I've got three alternate sites within three days' walk. Every one of them with a hot spring. We'd have to do some digging for a while, but we'd have this back eventually. Probably pretty fast. There's no better work incentive than an opportunity to get back something that you had and lost; you know just what you want and how bad you want it."

I must've stared off into s.p.a.ce then, because he asked me what I'd thought of, and then I realized what it was. "Yeah," I said. "It's not just material, either. My second marriage was much more work than my first. And when Resuna turned me, I fought a far, far bigger battle to be a decent person again than I'd had to fight years before just to start out as one. And yet, somehow, that much harder fight seemed easier, I guess because I knew where I was going and what I was after. Sort of like, if you and I had to recreate this room somewhere else, knowing how nice it is, we'd work harder and feel less tired."

"You said you had to work hard once One True turned you?" Dave asked. "I thought Resuna just relayed orders from One True, which did what it wanted to people, no work on your part, and that if you did any work, it was in resisting it, so that it was just dragging you around like a puppet."

"Well, I suppose that One True can drag people around like puppets if it wants to," I said, "but that's a terribly inefficient way to work, like teaching a dog to walk on a leash by dragging it down the sidewalka-it works after a fas.h.i.+on but it's better to have cooperation."

"But if you didn't want to cooperate, why did you join it?"

A thought clicked: if I were to tell a story that took all night, I could buy hours of time. Not to mention maybe get some more sympathy built up. It wasn't the greatest strategy I'd ever thought up, I knew, but it was one more strategy than I'd had a minute ago. "Well," I said, "it's a complex story, which isn't a bad thing, in my situation. I never ran One True back when it was brain-native. Like most people, I got Resuna and joined One True, rather than running One True in the years before Year One, and then converting to Resuna. I got Resuna just a few months before most people dida-right at the end of the War of the Memes. But all the same, I wasn't one of those that had to be forced. I accepted it knowing what I was getting into. That has to do with my second wife, Mary."