Century Next Door - Candle Part 9

He came out from the back. He was naked, except for a dozen medical sensors hanging from his head, neck, chest, and back, and carrying his jump bag.

"You better tell me about that," he said.

I sketched it out for him quicklya-getting hurt, losing my temper, and saying the words to invoke Resuna. "Honest, Dave, I really didn't mean to do thata-"

"Oh, I believe you, for whatever good that does either of us. I can't imagine that twenty years of habit breaks that easy. It ain't anybody's fault; something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. So it took you over and then what happened?"

"I skied down to put the stuff into the cache, but I went straight across the meadow. It was all new powder down there, and I left tracks that are bound to be picked up from orbit. Might as well have painted a bull's-eye around the cache. Not to mention that I'm sure, as often as we've traveled between there and here, they're going to follow my track back herea-if they don't already know exactly where we are and what we're doing. I figure that when my copy of Resuna woke up, it probably just automatically carried out the job I had been doing when it took over. That's something that Resuna does, because you want it to work on what's important if you're in an emergency. Then after it got the stuff into the cache and wasn't sensing as much anxiety from me, it probably commed One True, via satellite, and told it everything. I figure they'll be here inside an hour."

"Well," he said, "do you know for sure that you phoned One True? Or did you just a.s.sume that you must have because Resuna had control for a while?"

"That was what I a.s.sumed; it's what Resuna would do."

"Then I can put both our minds at a little ease. One reason why it took you so long to wake up, I suspect, is because back when I first had you captured and unconscious, to be on the safe side I hooked up your jack to some electronic stuff I've got and zapped it a bunch of waysa-RF, high voltage, low-level DC current, even a tickle of plain old one-ten sixty-cycle AC (though I put you in line with a big resistor for that). Probably didn't do your brain much good, but if it was possible to fry that jack, I fried it. I know I ran a big risk with your brain and all, but you know, at the time I didn't know you and I was still deciding whether to kill you. And I'm real glad now that I don't seem to have done any permanent brain damage. But I'm also glad that I did try to cook that little gadget, because it's probably good and dead, and chances are that when your copy of Resuna woke up, after you got whacked on the skull, it just ran in your head until you were conscious enough to take over again."

"That is rea.s.suring," I said, "and no hard feelings about my brain. As much as I bang it around, who knows where any one piece of damage might've come from? Still, the ski tracks are pointing out that cache, and so we're bound to lose that, and when they find it they'll find their way here, quick enough, pos-def. We've made a good twenty trips out to it, and by now we've surely left enough track for any decent hunter to follow, even with varying the route all the time. So the hunters are going to be at that cache sometime tomorrow, at latest, and then they'll be here within a few hours. They might could be here in as little as three hours, if the satellite saw the track right away and everybody jumped on it. And if it was three hoursa-well, between one thing and another, about half of that time is burned already, with time spent getting here and the time we've been talking."

"Well, then," Dave said, "we've got sleeping bags up there already, we've got our jump bags packeda-I was just putting in some of the medicines you need to take for a few years after a suspended animation, so I'll go back and grab the rest of my stash of those. At least it would make sense to go up to the new cave and stay up there a few days, then real cautiously come down and see what's happened to home base here, if anything. While we're up there, anyway, we can do some digging, and move a couple of the caches up into the new place too if we take that slow and careful. The only thing that's frustrating is that I got a nice cow elk, plump for this time of year, and didn't have time to do more than gut her out and hang her up. We'll probably lose that meat, and I was really looking forward to some nice steaks in a couple days. Other than that, though, I'm ready to go if you are."

"You might want to put some pants on," I pointed out. "It is still February, you know."

Ten minutes later, jump bags on our backs, we were gliding off toward Ute Ridge. The way I figured it, surely Dave knew he had some explaining to do, and he'd get around to it soon enough, without my prompting. Meanwhile, with some prospect of escapea-and a possibility that I had not irrevocably blown everythinga-the world didn't seem quite so desperate. It wasn't exactly the best situation, but it was still considerably better than what I'd had not long before.

We did the last two and a half miles in deep darknessa-the moon hadn't even risen yet, and while starlight is surprisingly bright at high alt.i.tude on a field of snow, still all you can really see is silhouettes, and not even that amid the trees. When we got close, and had to pa.s.s deeper into the shadows, we pulled on starlight goggles to make our way in. We took skis in with us, leaving them on the upper shelf, and then, once we were inside, had a quick cold meal from the cache there, and then stretched out in the sleeping bags, on the clay-mud floor, not far from the dribble of hot water.

From where I lay, I could just see over the upper shelf and a little bit out the opening, which was obscured every few seconds by a puff of fog, as cold air from outside met the warm wet air that rose from this cave. I saw a bright star, flickering violently, disappearing and reappearing in the fog, through the little cave mouth, and figured out in my head that it might be half an hour before the star moved out of sight from this angle, but before I even saw it move toward the edge, I was asleep.

<> The sun never shone down that hole directly, but enough bounce light came through in the morning to wake me up. The dim light from overhead made our new home even less attractive than a cave in the woods usually is. Well, with enough work, maybe we'd get this place fixed up fit to live in, though I doubted it would ever be anything like as nice as the place Dave had built before. Or rather the place he had lived in, I reminded myself. He probably hadn't built it; more likely he had just lived there, and whoever he worked for, or used to work for, had built and stocked the place.

I climbed out of the sleeping bag; I had been sleeping in my thermies, and I was still uncomfortably warm after getting out of the bag. So I peeled out of the thermies, turned them inside out to air, got a small piece of soap from my jump bag, and managed sort of a sponge bath in the trickle at one end of the cave. It was better than nothing, but far from that hot tub.

"You do realize that's also the coffee water?" Dave grumbled, dragging himself along. "And yes, I have some freeze-dried stuff, and a couple of cups. That's our beverage. And for the meal, today, sir, a can of tomatoes, a can of beans, and some powdered eggs, goes into a pot with hot water, glop fit for a king, and it's what there is anyway." He put two cups on a rock and poured a splash of freeze-dried coffee in each. "I could tell you something about that water, but you ought to find out for yourself."

I took a cup and held it under the hot trickle, letting it fill up, and then tapped the cup a few times to make sure that the coffee powder had dissolved.

One sip told me. "Iron," I said, running my tongue around my mouth to try to wipe some of the bitter astringent feel away.

"No anemia for us," he agreed. "I'll finish yours if you don't want it."

"It's caffeine," I said, "and I've had worse." I sat on a rock near enough the stream to be warm. "Should I unpack the stuff for breakfast?"

"I'll get it in a minute; I'm gonna wash up. I know a trick or two for making iron water palatable."

Still sipping my coffee, I wandered back around to the back of the cave and carefully took a leak right where the stream flowed back into the ground. If somebody soaking at a spa two hundred miles away had any problem with that, they could write me.

When I got back, Dave had finished soaping and rinsing, and was dumping the ingredients into the pot. The water was two notches too hot to wash comfortably with, not quite hot enough to heat the food, and I made a mental note that we would need a cistern or something for the long run. (I doubted we were going to find a cool well up here, at least at any depth we had the equipment to reach.) Eggs, tomatoes, and beans aren't a bad mix, per se, and I've eaten worse, but on the other hand I've had better, and the water hadn't quite been hot enough to make the dried eggs fluff up. So it could have been a whole lot better, too. We gobbled it down, had another cup of iron coffee each, and then looked the situation over.

"I'd suggest we work in just gloves, boots, and shorts," Dave said. "And since we never did get your screen box built, what do you have in mind for getting the dirt to wash down the stream?"

"Let me try an experiment or two," I said. We got dressed as Dave had suggested, and went back into the chamber and put three long-life lights up high. With no opening to the surface, this room was almost up to room temperature anyway.

"The trick is to make sure it mixes well," I pointed out. "Let's try the simplest possible way." I put five shovelfuls of dirt into one of our buckets, carried it back to where the spring came in, let it fill with watera-which made it a world heaviera-stirred with the shovel, and poured it into the outlet. It went gurgling down without any sign of blocking or forming a dam. "It's not going to be as fast as a screen box would have been," I said. "But we have a bucket and a big cook pot. We can probably put one of each down the hole every ten minutes or so, allowing for breaks and meals and that kind of thing. We'll still get plenty of work done in a day, anyway. And whenever it gets tough or we get bored, we can sneak out and move a cache. I was thinking there are two that aren't so far away, and we might move them in a few days. Let's give it a month or so, though, before we pop up our heads in Dead Mule drainage; I have a feeling they'll be setting up an ambush there, and probably sitting in it for a good long while."

"Makes sense," Dave said, nodding soberly. "And it does beat the whole process of hauling it out in packs."

I turned and threw a couple shovelfuls into the bucket. "You know," I said, "after what I saw yesterday, and what I've figured out, I'd have to say that I don't believe you ever hauled even one pack of dirt out of that place."

He tossed his second shovelful into the cook pot, walked out to the spring inlet, and came back slos.h.i.+ng it around. He poured it down the hole and finally said, "Well, you're wrong, there, Currie, though you're right that I didn't build the whole place. But I put the tub into the tub room, and I did build that library. And I hauled some dirt for those, because I never did think of doing things the way you came up with."

I emptied two more buckets while I waited for him to come up with something else to say, but he didn't, so eventually I just asked him. "Uh, okay, do you mind if I ask if you're going to tell me what's going on?"

"I've been trying to think of how to do just that," Dave said. "My problem is that I don't know exactly how to help you see what's going on, or why it matters, or anything, and it really seems like somehow I ought to be able to tell you all of it at once, and so there's no real one single place to start, and I get bogged down in trying to pick one. To understand one part, you need to understand three. Like that. But I'm not trying to hold out on you, not anymore, Currie. And I'd have told you eventuallya-it was just a question of when to tell you how much, because, well, you were real bound into One True and I wasn't sure which thing I might say might wake up your Resuna."

I was a little mollified that he was at least thinking, perhaps, that he owed me some explanation. I let it go for another couple bucketloads. We had now put a hole in the floor, mostly around the exit hole, perhaps a meter across and half a meter deep.

As he came back and poured his cook pot full of hot mud into the water, and watched it swirl down, he said, "We ought to at least dig down to some rock by day's end and get that hole pritnear as wide as it'll easily go. Okay, Currie, here's my story. Final version. All the truth as far as I know it. And I was probably wrong to keep it from you, once it was clear you'd come around to my side."

For the rest of that morning, we loaded buckets and sent mud down that hole, and every so often he'd tell me more of his story, as we watched for any sign that we had to stop dumping the mud. As I'd guessed, there was room enough for all the mud to go down there, so fara-our probes, and some shouting down there for echoes, made me think that the chamber below was mostly empty and probably twenty feet high and a hundred long. Of course, if the mud dammed up the exit to that chamber, then it would start to fill and we could be dealing with a nuisance, but when we got this hole wide enough open, we should be able to see whether or not that was likely to happen. Meanwhile there was surely room enough for the mud from this early part of the job.

Between the heavy work and the heat from the spring, we were both sweaty and grimy when we stopped for a quick lunch of some jerky and hard rolls, washed down with yet more iron coffee.

We both took a few muscle relaxants before starting again, and that got the story flowing better because the relaxants. .h.i.t like mild, long-lasting alcohol. During that "whole afternoon, off and on, a few sentences at a time as we'd pa.s.s each other, dumping mud and shoveling the buckets, I heard the rest of Dave's story, and we finished it over hot soup and fresh bread that we were able to fix by using up one precious chemical heater; we felt like we both needed it badly. By that time we had a hole big enough for us to stand in together, almost a meter and a half deep, and a good two meters across. The opening in the floor turned out to be a round hole, perhaps a foot across, that seemed to lead down into a much bigger open s.p.a.ce. The odor coming up out of there was slightly musty, but not bad; probably it had no direct outlet to the outside world.

"Anyway," I said, "we can accelerate the whole process, because there's obviously much more room down there than there is clay up here, and it will be a while before we start opening that area up for ourselves. Give it a week and we'll be done excavating, even counting the time to go move another cache or two here. I'm not sure where we'll salvage or steal the plumbing to put in a real hot-water-and-heat system, but we'll come up with something, anyway."

"G.o.d, you're better at this than I ever would hope to be," Dave said, sighing.

"Considering what you did get through, you can hold your head up in any company you want," I a.s.sured him.

We each had a little snort to help us sleep. Between the night's booze and the day's exercise, my sleeping bag on a clay floor in a steamy cave felt like a heated waterbed with a down comforter in a high-priced hotel. I watched the star through the hole for just a few seconds, and then fell asleep. That night I dreamed, over and over, of the story that Dave had told me.

I got a great rest and woke up only somewhat sore, but the dreams of that night were with me for a long time after, and for the next daya-very much like the previous one in the work we dida-I kept thinking of other questions to ask him, and other ways to try to make his story hang together in my brain, in a way that wouldn't disturb me quite so much. By the end of that second day I had the whole thing, pritnear as clear as it would ever get, and by then I had about arrived at the decision that there wasn't a thing to do, for me or for anyone on Earth, that wouldn't be a huge mistake. Then Dave pointed out the last part to me, which I'd missed, and I went and made that huge mistake, all on my own.

<> Dave Singleton's name derived from something strange that had happened in the Foundling's Entrance at Denver Dome's munic.i.p.al orphanage in 2043.

During the Gray Decade, probably a quarter of the babies born became foundlings, as city after city ran out of money and shut down the Dole, and with it the Dolework that had at least allowed families to stay together, and single mothers to afford child care and support a family. Many people just could not afford to keep the babies they had. Because of that, most orphanages and hospitals had a "Foundling's Entrance," a warm, sheltered, discreet foyer, with an entrance where it was easy to come and go un.o.bserved, which was a safe place to leave off a baby anonymously. Usually it was set up with a counter, but no one at the counter; instead, a large hand-scrawled sign said, "Back in 3 minutes." This allowed people who just wanted to set the baby down and run to do so; an AI watched through a hidden camera, and when it saw a baby drop-off in progress, it would sound an alarm at a desk in the staff quarters, so that a human being could decide what to do. Sometimes that meant hurrying there to be "just arriving back," and sometimes it meant staying out of sight until the person was gone and the baby had been left.

Two days before Dave had been dropped off there, a girl who didn't look much more than thirteen had come in with two-week-old twin boys, one in an ancient car seat and the other in a cardboard box, and stood waiting patiently at the counter till an attendant came out. She had emphatically insisted at the counter that since her boyfriend, Dave, had been killed, both twins would have to be named Dave, and that was the only way she was giving them up.

"Maybe they should have a different middle name or last name, so people won't mix them up?" the attendant suggested, hoping that she would see the reasonableness of this.

"I already thought of that," the girl said. "I never knew my boyfriend's last name, anyway. He had this Um important job where he wasn't allowed to date or see girls or nothing. It was like national security or something like that. He told me some stuff about it that I can't tell anyone else. Anyway, since it all had to be secret, I never knew his last name, but since he got, you know, shot and I saw him die, pos-def I wanted to give his babies the names I called him. So they both have to be Dave, but here's the middle and last names." She pulled a note from her s.h.i.+rt pocket, unfolded it, and handed it across the counter. "The one on the right is Bear. *Kay? I have to go. The Salvation Army where I'm staying doesn't feed us if we're late, and I want to get my last meal because now that I gave up the kids they'll throw me out tomorrow." She left in a cloud of other half-explanations.

The attendant had handled messier cases, and she shrugged. She looked at the sheet of paper and turned to the twin to her lefta-figuring the girl had meant the one to her own righta-and said, "Well, I guess you're Dave Bear. And you must be Dave Love," she added to the other twin. "Welcome to Denver Dome Orphanage."

Within an hour they were known to everyone in the place as the Dave Twins. The signs on their incubators read "David M. Love" and "David P. Bear," but it's natural for people to gossip, and gossip reaches everyone in an inst.i.tution eventually, even the children, so the Dave Twins endured years of being teased about their middle names, "My" and "Pooh."

Two days later, another baby turned up, dropped off by a different but also very young girl. This one was in a cardboard box with a couple of stuffed toys and a blanket, plus a note that said, "Call him anything as long as it's Dave. That was his father's name. You can tell him his father is a spy or a cop or something, and he must have gone undercover because he never came back to marry me."

"I even looked like I should have been the third Dave Twin," Dave said, as we squatted at lunch the first day, "which makes me kinda suspect that the original Dave got around plenty."

Since the first two were the Dave Twins, some wit on the staff suggested this one should be the Dave Singleton.

The Denver Dome orphanage was small and poor; Denver had never really recovered from the fires that had raged through it in the last part of the Eurowar, and the new dome there didn't cover much more than the old downtown. It was still an important crossroads and a good place for a warehouse, but since hardly any human beings were needed to staff warehouses anymore, most of the old city remained untenanted, infested with a few vags and packs of stray dogs, for many decades before the dome finally was nuked in 2059. Clamped savagely between a vanished tax base and a large number of the poor, Denver Dome had nothing to spare for its orphanage. From what I remembered of Denver Dome, the few times I had been through there before it was nuked, it was a cold, poor, mean town in spirit anyway, one that didn't mind the sight of misery much, so I doubt it broke their hearts not to have anything to spend on their poor.

In 2049, with the war breaking out, and every social problem worsening, the Denver Dome Council was looking hard for a way, any old way, to shut down the orphanage for good and thereby cut expenses. It didn't take them long to hit on the same solution that lots of places did: they made the children available to everyone who wanted them. Even in its early years, the War of Papal Succession was a war for control of human brains, most especially the brains of the next generation; one way to get brains was to more or less buy them while they were still enclosed in children. The market for kids was brisk.

Boys twelve and up went off to militias and mercenary companies; girls were sold to affluent families as servants, if they were lucky, and to barely disguised pimps if they were not; younger children went off to be adopted by families, schools, sects, and creches so that they could all be indoctrinated by all the various splinters off of Ecucatholicism and cybertao.

When Phil and Monica Comasus came by the orphanage, one nice sunny Monday morning in February, 2050, they said they wanted to take three kids with them, and offered to pay in NihonAmerica bearer bonds, which were still being honored because the transfer s.h.i.+ps were the collateral. n.o.body at the orphanage asked any questions; most of the staff didn't care, and the few who did, didn't want to know whether the kids were going to be adopted, or slaves, or used in medical experiments. Their job, as defined by the city, was to get what money they could for handing over kids.

They were trying to do it in a hurry, because, however bad the other options might be, it was clear this orphanage wouldn't be in business much longer, with Denver leaning toward bankruptcy and the rest of the world going to h.e.l.l. The first serious shots of the War of Papal Succession were just being fired, the rubble of Rome wasn't cool yet, and armies big enough to have real battles were only just being organized and trained.

Phil Comasus was a short mana-almost tiny. He was shorter than his wife, Monica, who was only of average height. They made an odd couple, to seven-year-old Dave's eyes, because they contrasted in so many ways. Phil might have been fifteen years older than Monica. He was plump and soft-bodied; she was slender, angular, and well-muscled. She had thick black hair, high cheekbones, blue eyes, and the kind of patrician good looks that Hollywood used to insist on for its "serious" actresses; he had b.u.mpy, squashed features that made him look like one of the Seven Dwarves, an effect accentuated by his perpetually untidy slush-gray goatee. Both were quietly but expensively dressed, a few social notches above the Doleworkers who ran the orphanage. "They were a fairy-tale couple," Dave said to me, as we stopped for sandwiches and some iron coffee, "except in most fairy tales, the troll doesn't marry the princess."

Dave said he realized, even at age seven, that things were going to be different from now on, not when they told him that he would be leaving with this couple within half an hour, and not when he packed up his things, or when the whole orphanage lined up to say good-bye to him, Cecile, and Robin. The moment when he knew everything would be different was after they went into the diskster, Monica showed them how to strap in, and she said, "Nowa-do you have absolutely everything you should? Is there anything you want or need that you forgot to pick up? They rushed you out of there, and I don't want to leave anything behind if it's yours and it's your favorite."

Dave had three sets of clothes, a tiny stuffed bear that had been a present from Mrs. Allen before she got laid off, and a bag of toiletries. He didn't really care about all the crayon drawings in his locker, and the crayons were the property of the orphanagea-they were always telling him not to use so many.

Cecile, a quiet, small, dark-haired girl of five, also had nothing else. But ten-year-old Robin, a husky and muscular Asian girl who was one of the leaders of kid society, spoke up and said, "I can't remember if I packed a picture of my real mother. It's the only one I have."

"Well," Monica said, "take a look in your bag, and if we don't find it, we'll go in and look for it."

Robin looked and couldn't find it, so she and Monica went inside together. While they were in there, Phil got out a set of jacks and a balla-neither Cecile nor Dave had ever seen any such thing beforea-and started teaching them to play jacks. At first Dave couldn't see the point, but after a few minutes he and Cecile were starting to see what it was about, and pretty soon they were engrossed in a game, coached by Phil. Dave thought it was bizarre that a grown-up genuinely cared how the two of them played a gamea-or seemed to get such a kick out of watching them do ita-but it was bizarre in the nicest way he'd ever seen.

After about half an hour, Monica returned with Robin and the picture. Robin was holding her hand and her eyes were s.h.i.+ning; it was obvious that Monica had just become her hero. "Can you believe it?" Monica said in a tone of outrage. "She had left it behind on top of her locker, because she wanted to pack it on top of her bag, and they made her hurry out so fast she forgot ita-and they saw it and even though our diskster was sitting right in front of the building, they didn't come out and tell usa-they had already thrown it away! We had to pull it out from the recycler hopper, and I made them let us use their scrubber to clean it. It's good as new now, but imagine treating a photo of Robin's mother that way!"

"Well," Phil said, "we're done with that place for good, thank heavens. Time to get rolling again."

They all strapped in because the trip out of the city would be zigzaggy; Phil promised they'd all play jacks again. "Many times," he added, emphatically. "There might never be a last game. You might still be playing in the old-folks home."

Dave and Cecile giggled at that, and after making sure everyone was comfortable, Phil told the diskster an address in the KC Dome, and it extended the thousands of tiny pins from its surface, charged up into a faint, crackling blue glow, and shot off faster than Dave had ever moved before. For all three kids it was their first diskster ride.

After they had ridden for some miles, and were racing over the empty plains, Robin whispered to them, "She was so mad at them for throwing out my mom's picture! And she made them fix everything. It was so koapy. It must be like that to have a mom."

Dave nodded, trying to appear wise to such things. He turned to look out the window. It was a day full of amazing thingsa-a diskster ride, a long trip, adult attentiona One advantage of the war not yet being completely on, just yet, was that you could still cross the country in a diskster. The Comasus diskster stopped at the munic.i.p.al orphanages in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, picking up two to four children between five and ten years old at each one, and by the time it set down in front of a huge fake-Victorian house in upstate New York, the kids had all gotten some acquaintance with each other, Monica had settled a quarrel or two, Phil had taught them a number of silly songs, and everyone had been measured for new clothes.

The thirteen newly acquired orphans had all been admonished to call Phil and Monica by their first names, and to not to worry about anything, because they were getting taken care of from now on.

Dave told me, as we threw clay into the hole, that his first sight of the Big House would "probably be the last thing to fade from my brain on the day I die, and if anybody ever could prove to me that there was a heaven and it was as good a place as the Big House, I'd be happy to die that minute."

It was late in the evening, but the moon was up and bright, when they followed the winding track up from the small, shallow, ice-covered river through the pines to the top of the ridge, crested the top, and decelerated over the wide snowfield that spread out in front of them. In the moonlight the house was all silvers and blues; it was three stories high, with a main body as big as the Munic.i.p.al Orphanage back homea-no, that's not home anymore. Dave thought with something close to pure gleea-and two sizable wings extending from it. At the time, Dave thought it looked like a house in a story set somewhere in history, like you could see on the flashchannel when the bigger boys weren't keeping it tuned to sports. Later he realized that it wasn't really laid out like any of those; the immense wraparound porches on each wing, the big flat diskster landing area in the front, the extremely tall and steep metal roofsa-with the black circles on them that he did not realize at the time were automatic gun-portsa-all made it very much a twenty-first-century building. Still, to the naive eye, it might have been an old resort house, from back when people had come up from the city to spend summers in this part of the country.

The diskster flared off its surplus charge in a blue whoosh and settled onto its pad. In a few minutes, Phil and Monica had awakened everyone, sorted out baggage, and organized a groggy parade into the immense main room of the house. It was just settling into Dave's mind that these two people owned this magnificent place, the way that he owned his shoes.

Of course the first thing they did was send all the kids into the large ground-floor bathrooma-many people, kids especially, just can't use the bathroom on a diskster, and they hadn't stopped since Detroit, two hours earlier.

When everyone had returned from that first necessity, Monica took a quick roll, and then led them downstairs. Dave thought that this was probably where the boys' and girls' barracks would be, but instead they went into a big room where an industrial faxbricator sat by a large pile of folded clothing. Phil and Monica went forward and began sorting through the pile, eventually making up thirteen smaller piles of new clothes.

Before departing on their child-gathering trip, the Comasuses had loaded that faxbricator with bolts of forty different fabrics; Phil had zapped the kids' measurements on ahead, and when they arrived, handed a pile of brand-new clothes to each kid. All the clothes fit, and had the kid's own name sewn into them. They had even paid attention to favorite colors, and put kid-selected designs on the sweats.h.i.+rts and Ts.h.i.+rts.

When he got his pile, Dave just grabbed the first thing on the top and sat right down on the floor, holding his green Bobbert the s.p.a.ce Tiger sweats.h.i.+rta-his favorite color and his favorite flashchannel character. It had "Dave Singleton" on the label. They had even made sure it was a soft label made to rest against his neck comfortably, not a big scratchy one sewn in for the convenience of an inst.i.tutional laundry. He was trying very hard to understand that this sweats.h.i.+rta-exactly what he had wanted for at least two yearsa-was now all his, brand new, absolutely clean and never worn by anyone else. He clung to it for a long while, pressing his face against it.

"You can put it on now, if you want," Monica said, "but you might just want to carry it up to your room, along with everything else."

"Carry it up to the moon?" Dave asked.

Monica's eyes twinkled. At the time, she was about thirty-five, but to a five-year-old, all adults are terribly old. Dave looked at her closely and curiously, for the first time. She had explosions of tiny laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, and an oversupply of very light-colored freckles. In her jet-black hair there were already a few strands of gray. Her voice was low, modulated, the sort of voice that, before AIs, could have made a fortune in voice-overs.

Dave was in love instantly, as were all twelve of the other children. "Not carry it to the moon," Monica said. "You're not quite ready for that, Dave, though you might be some day. Carry it to your room. Come on, I'm going to show everybody where their room is."

Dave joined a parade of the other small kidsa-himself and Cecile, from Denver; a dark haired girl, terribly thin, with pallid skin and a vampire-red mouth, about eight, named Julia, from the Chicago orphanage; Prester, about Dave's age, a very thin, dark-skinned kid, with big expressive eyes, crooked teeth, and extremely funny jokes, from St. Louis, who Dave was already hoping would become a friend; a quiet boy who might have been a mix of any or all races, named Joey, who was a lot taller than Dave but acted about the same age, and so might be another friend.

They were all going to what Monica called "West Third." She explained that it meant that their bedrooms were on the third floor of the west wing of the house. Dave had never been in a house with a wing before, but he figured out what that meant after some momentary confusion. (He really would not have been surprised if the house had turned out to be able to fly, after everything that had happened that day. Maybe to the moon.) The five children were shown the bathroom they were to share, each given towels with their names on them, shown the games, books, and small table that had been placed in a wide spot in the hall. Each of them had a room with a desk and chair, closet, bookshelves (and some books on thema-and Dave was pretty sure that all of those were new, just like the clothes), bed, chest, and as far as Dave could see, everything you could possibly want in a bedroom, even including a door. "Remember when you want to talk to someone else to knock on his or her door, and wait for the person to say *Come in,' and don't come in unless they say it," Monica said. "And they'll do the same for you. That way you'll always be able to feel like this is your s.p.a.ce."

She gave them all a snacka-the idea of cereal before bed, just because it would feel good, was strange, but Dave decided he liked it. Then they all got to take showers, and everyone had a brand-new toothbrush and toothpaste. Dave had never been quite so clean, or gone to bed in a room that was neither too hot nor too cold, or felt such clean sheets before. Monica even tucked him ina-something he had only seen on the flashchannela-and said good night.

As he drifted off to sleep, he could hear the sounds coming down the hall, from East Third and East Second. The bigger kids were getting showered, laughing and talking. Phil was hanging around down there, it sounded like; they could hear his big booming laugh now and then, and his intense, serious voice explaining things. It sounded like the bigger kids were having a good time too.

Just before he fell asleep, Dave prayed, for the first time in his life, though he had had no religious instruction and wasn't even sure he knew who he was asking to help him. Nonetheless he prayed with all the pa.s.sion and sincerity a seven-year-old can manage. He wanted all this to be here when he woke up.

<> Perhaps the greatest miracle was that it was. Shortly after dawn, Dave was awakened by Phil knocking on the door and saying, "Get up, get dressed (put clean stuff on, if you've worn it, we'll wash it), use the can, and come downstairs. Breakfast in ten minutes."

As Dave pulled on his miraculously still-present green Bobbert sweats.h.i.+rt, he could hear the thumps and chatter of other kids getting up, and by the time he had taken his turn at the bathroom he heard a babble of voices downstairs. The dining room and main kitchen were on the first floor of the west wing, and he raced Prester all the way down the stairs.

Breakfast today would be ham, pancakes with apple compote, and orange juice. Everyone was used to pancakes because they were a staple of orphanage food, but most had never had apple compote, orange juice was an occasional treat, and ham had been mostly for holidays, and strictly rationed.

When breakfast was finally finished, they all went upstairs and learned the rules for keeping their roomsa-just simple things like hanging up clothes, putting dirty clothes in hampers, keeping things on hooks and shelves and not on the floor, making the bed, dusting, all much simpler than following the rules about your bunk in the orphanage, since here at the Big House you had a place for just about everything, and all you had to do was put things where they belonged and wipe surfaces off. Then they went on a tour of the house and, since the day was mild, put on coats and hats and went out and built snowmen on the lawn. Pretty soon everyone was running around and laughing, throwing little unpacked s...o...b..a.l.l.s. Phil showed them some games you could play in the snow, and everyone had a good time with those, even the older kids.

About the time that they were ready to be tired and cold, but were not quite there yet, Monica ushered them back into the house, where they hung up their coats and hats, put their boots on the drying grate, and then filed back into the dining room. Phil announced lunch: hot dogs, french fries, baked beans, and hot chocolatea-and once again, all that you wanted of everything.

After lunch, as they settled into a pleasant stupor on the couches and chairs in the big room called the "Commons," Monica read them a storya-there had been one nice woman at the orphanage who read stories, Dave recalled faintly, but she had been laid off before he was five, and this was the first time he'd heard a story, instead of seeing one on the flashchannel, in a couple of years. It was difficult to follow it without the pictures and without being able to click on things for explanations, but it was still very nice of her, Dave thought. The littler kids seemed to take to it better than the big ones.

Then she took them all to West Second, which turned out to have a cla.s.sroom in it, with thirteen big desks, one for each of the kids. "This is where you'll all go to school," she explained. "There are other workrooms and project s.p.a.ces as well, and a library over in East First, where you'll work much of the time on your own, but this s.p.a.ce will be home base, where usually your day will begin and end, and most days you'll be here for at least a couple of hoursa-sometimes for the whole day."

They were all so startled by the first thing that she had said that most of them didn't catch the rest. She had to repeat her entire spiel a couple of times. In most places, for at least the last ten years, orphanage kids hadn't been allowed to go to school, either because all the public schools had been closed as part of the Gray Decade's economy measures, or because if there were public schools, orphans were excluded as "not taxpayer children."

Once they realized that Monica really did mean that they would all be getting regular schooling, just like rich kids, they were wildly excited. They got a few minutes to explore their desks, discovering pencils, crayons, a brand-new werp for each of them, reams of paper, several booksa-which Monica a.s.sured them they would be taught to reada-and too many other miracles to even categorize in those first exciting minutes.

Then Phil came in. He sat down on the desk at front and said, "I suppose you're all normal enough to be wondering why we brought you here and what we're going to do with you. So I'm going to tell you. If it seems weird to you, well, it sometimes seems weird even to me. But I think you'll like it here, basically, and mostly it will be a step up from where you were."

Dave was willing to grant that point.

"Many years ago," Phil said, "I was one of the designers of the transfer-s.h.i.+p societies. The transfer s.h.i.+ps are the huge s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps that look like bright stars at night, and come in near Earth every few months, like the Flying Dutchman and Diogenes, the ones that run in the big cycler orbits to supply the colonies on other planets. What I did, along with half a dozen other people, was to plan and help create the system of child-rearing and education that was then used to produce the first generation born on the s.h.i.+ps, the people who operate them now. I also had something of a hand in planning the basic social rules under which they grew up, and the culture into which they would grow. I was hired to do that because they needed to produce a whole bunch of very smart people who got along together really well, and who would help to save the human race, and I was well known as a teacher, as a scientist, and for some other accomplishments, various other things that need not concern us for the moment, here."

Dave later learned that, under his original name, Comasus had been a very young senator from Ma.s.sachusetts in the 112th Congress, the last US Congress ever to meet. He had also shared a n.o.bel Prize in Economics, and served a few years as Deputy Administrator for the Environment of UNRRA-2.

"There were some things the other society designers didn't believe me about, which was how eventually I got fired from my job as society designer, and part of why they're having the problems they're having on Mars and Ceres. Given the way events have turned out, they probably believe me now," Phil went on. "But that's neither here nor there; on the transfer s.h.i.+ps and in the colonies, things have worked out, if not as well as they might, at least tolerably well, and nowadays there wouldn't be anything for me to do even if they hired me back. So, despite being occasionally bitter about it, I am usually able to let that go, and take pleasure in having made a really good try, in my younger days, at saving the world.