Part 1 (2/2)
One True had decided that Mom's nerves would be better if she were living in a quiet cabin in the woods, and that I needed a calm mother. Resuna patiently reminded me, now and then, that we had to live way out here because in past generations Mom might have been abusive, alcoholic, or both; she'd led a hard life before she turned, and I had a few ugly memories myselfa-we'd been living as wild squatters in Vegas Ruin until I was three, when the team found us and turned us, and the world suddenly got all better.
I was sitting on the floor, in our house up in the mountains, playing Parcheesi with Mom. We both thought that game was a pleasant way to kill time while you watch snow fall among the aspens early in an October evening. We were discussing whether we wanted popcorn, hot chocolate, or both, tonight, when we were startled by a terrible crash.
A man in an outside suit, the kind that rescue workers wear out here in the mountains, came running up the stairs from where he had smashed down the door. He was holding something in his handa-I didn't recognize it, but Mom did and I got a vague sense that it could hurt us badly. The impression through our linked copies of Resuna was only in my mind for an instant before Mom screamed ”My G.o.d, don't hurt us” and her strong surge of emotions shut the link down.
The man in the suit came a step forward, and said, ”Shut up.” Then he said something horrible to usa-something that I can't remember now, mercifully, because Resuna and One True have erased it from me, but once he said it, I couldn't receive Mom's thoughts or feelings, and Resuna was not there, and I had no way to call One True to help us, no comforting voice in my head to tell me I could get through this. I had no way of knowing what Mom needed from me, or of telling her what I needed.
The man in the suit slapped Mom, hard, twice. She fell away from him, barely catching her balance, staring dumbly at the hand that was raised to strike her again. Blood flowed out of her mouth.
It was like a nightmare, except that Resuna wasn't there to wake me up and tell me it was all right. I was frozen, not moving, unable to think, just endlessly screaming for Resuna in my mind.
The man slapped me too; I didn't know why. I hadn't been hit at least since Mom had turned, and the sensationsa-flesh crushed against skull on one side of the head, teeth stinging in suddenly swelling gums, one eye running with uncontrollable tearsa-were a thousand times worse because nothing explained them to me, and I had only my own body's natural shock response.
The man pulled back his hood and said, ”Medicine synthesizer. I need your medicine synthesizer. I need you to put your hand in there and have it diagnose and prescribe for me.”
”Will it do that?” Mom asked. Her voice was timid, shy, high-pitched, like a little girl's.
”Oh, it'll do it,” the horrible man said. His hair was as long as mine, matted to his skull with sweat, and his rough thick black beard was wet, almost dripping. He reeked like spoiling meat or a dead animal under the house. His eyes were too bright and his lips reddish purple against his too-pale skin. ”I'll show you how. All you have to do is do it. I want the medicine, I want a good meal, and maybe some other things. I just hurt you so you'd know I'm serious and you'd do what you're told. Now do what you're told and I won't have to hurt you any more.”
I fell out of Kelly's mind for a second, and everything froze into a still picture. Below the image of the man, One True inscribed a positive identification of Lobo, from voiceprint and DNA. A moment later it added that according to information and samples recovered later, the disease he was suffering from seemed to be a strain of measles, aggravated by mutAIDS. Both diseases were supposed to be extinct, but Earth's a big planet and you never know what might yet be festering in its untended corners.
Thena-I had just an instant to wish this wasn't necessarya-One True commanded, and my Resuna dropped me back into Kelly's memories.
As Kelly, I watched Mom put her hand into the medical synthesizer, and the man stood close to her and pressed a bare shoulder against the sampler. Then he spoke some codes aloud; in the old days communication between people and machines hadn't been perfect, and whoever this man was, he still knew how to use the old accesses that had been there, for example, so that parents could get medicine for their babies.
The man winced briefly as it gave him a pressure injection, but when that was done he sighed with relief.
He ate practically all the ready food in the house, and reconst.i.tuted three meals, each of which was supposed to be for four people, and gobbled those down as well, along with more coffee than you'd have thought could go into a human being. He seemed fascinated with our reconst.i.tutor; with a faraway look, he calculated for a few seconds, and finally decided to take it with him, along with almost all the food in the house. ”The rescue crews will bring you more,” he a.s.sured us, but I didn't believe him. I still wanted Resuna worse than I had ever wanted anything.
When he had finished eating, he said, ”There's one more thing I need. I'm very much from the old days, I spent a long time as a mercenary during the War of the Memes, and you know what that means. You and your daughter have cooperated just beautifully, and been very helpful, but there's something I want to do to both of you, which you are not going to like. I hope you'll do your best to cooperate so it isn't any more painful than it has to be.”
Mom was starting to cry, and I was afraid about what was going to happen.
The man said, ”Resuna is supposed to be able to erase everything, afterwards.”
Mom shook her head. ”It doesn't really work that way. I still have lim too many memories, from the old days, and they still hurt me every day.”
The man nodded, several times, as if he were thinking carefully about that. ”You know, part of me is very sorry to hear that. Another part of me is real happy to know that this is going to be in your head forever.”
Mom was crying really hard now, and that was so frightening that I started to cry too. The man grabbed us both by our arms and took us down to Mom's bedroom; he told us to take our clothes off, and left the room. Mom said we had to do what he said, so we did. I was cold and felt really strange about being naked.
A moment later he came back, with a tube of skin lotion from Mom's bathroom. He undressed, and told us where to put the lotion; it felt weird and icky. He had me watch while he did things to Mom, and then made her watch while he did the same things to me.
Then he got dressed. We were both crying. Mom was throwing up. It looked like he was crying too.
He grabbed up his pack of looted food, and the reconst.i.tutor, and said, ”Hey, I'm the last of my kind. I'm not going to ever come back. And it was nothing personal. Both of you were just here. Like getting hit by lightning, you know.”
He went back through the shattered door, and out into the snow; when he turned and saw us staring at him, he yelled, ”Get back upstairs out of the cold! And make sure the alarm is thrown!”
We did what he said. When we checked, the alarm was already going off. It was only maybe half an hour until the rescue crews got there in the disksters, and gave us new copies of Resuna, and took us to the hospital.
My new copy of Resuna is very kind and patient, like they're supposed to be, and supposedly I won't have big problems later, because all the bad things were dealt with so soon after they happened, and because Resuna is always there helping me. Sometimes One True itself checks in to see if I'm all right. Eventually, in a year or two, what happened will just make me sad, now and then, and maybe not very often if things go the way the doctors are hoping they will. I know it will work out, because Resuna says it will, and how can you do anything but trust Resuna?
All the same, the copy of Resuna that tells me things and comforts me is the new copy that the rescue crew put in, and I still miss my old Resuna. The new one doesn't know me as well as the one that had lived in my head since I was a little kid. I know that it will get better, but I miss my old one.
<> I fell backwards out of Kelly's mind. I was back in my comfortable chair at the table in the library; the hole in the table closed up, contracted into the folder, and became a dot no bigger than a period. I could go back there, if for some reason I ever wanted to.
I didn't want to. I could feel the picture of what he'd done to that mother and little girl building up inside me, a thing to be avenged and taken out on him, like the destruction of my crew a decade ago, like the deaths of Tammy and Carrie during the war, like all the good friends I had lost too young, like all the evil that the cowboys and their spiritual ancestors had worked in the world.
I had not felt such a pa.s.sion for a hunt in many years; maybe I had never felt it before at all. The anger hurt, physically, in my chest, but I knew Resuna needed me to be that angry, and I accepted the pain.
I opened another file folder, from the still-tall stack of them to my left. There was more, but there wasn't worse, and I was grateful for that, at least. I seemed to be there for hours reading all the accounts of what he'd done since his reappearance a few months previously. In those visions you have perfect concentration, and time pa.s.ses much faster than it does in the outside worlda-but it still takes a while to digest such a catalog of human evil, perverse cruelty, and solid constant nastiness. By the time I had finished my reading, I was feeling tired and sick, and felt like I'd used up a full day's energy right there in the ”library,” even though my copy of Resuna told me that I had only been in the vision for six minutes and fourteen seconds.
<> I sat back on my couch, talking to One True consciously now, no longer in the dream. ”Sort of flattering,” I said. ”There're at least five other hunters you could've picked who could've done the job. You could even've sent a whole posse of us. Why me?”
I was surrounded by warm, friendly laughter. One True was playing my auditory nerves a quad sound system. ”Why *why'?” it asked. ”We don't understand your reason for wanting to know our reasons, and your copy of Resuna doesn't seem to understand either. Are you fis.h.i.+ng for a compliment? Are you seeking clarification? Are youa-”
”It was the first thought that happened to pop into my head,” I said. ”You have five other reserve hunters for the Rockies. They're all very good too. I was just wondering why One True picked me.”
”Because we had to pick somebody,” One True said. ”So we picked the best one. Or at least the one with the best record. Do you think someone else could do it better?”
I thought about that. Resuna helpfully pulled up the records of the other five, and I compared those with my memories of them. They were all very good, but I had to agree that if we were just sending one, it probably ought to be me. ”No, I guess there's not.”
”Well, then, we'll send you. And just youa-because our guess is that since one hunter will make less noise and attract less attention than six, we should just send the best one after him. This Lobo is apt to be crafty and easily spooked.”
Outside, the very first hints of false dawn were starting to color the distant peaks on their east-facing sides; their west sides still shone brighter in the cold light of the full moon. It looked like a million degrees below zero out there, and I s.h.i.+vered despite the warmth in the room.
”Remember that excessive curiosity and doubt can damage your copy of Resuna,” One True reminded me. ”And because yours is such a veteran copy, it is to the benefit of all of us for it to stay in good shape. There's a lot of memory that the world needs in your head, Currie. Don't start arguing and questioning; all you'll do is hurt us all.”
”I'm sorry,” I said.
”We know,” One True said. ”Your copy of Resuna just relayed the feeling.”
I felt better. The mind of the whole planet understood that my feelings were sincere and my intentions were good. We didn't need to talk about much elsea-all the arrangements had been there in the dreama-and so I took a last look at the cold landscape outside and asked aloud, ”Bob, temperature of this room?”
”Seventy-three,” it answered, defaulting to Fahrenheit. ”Usually you feel warmer if I bring up lights. Would you like a warm glow, heavy on red and yellow, here and in the kitchen? Your sweet rolls will be ready in about two more minutes.”
”Do it,” I said. The room was suddenly bathed in yellows, reds, and oranges, flickering as if there were fireplaces on all the walls. ”Looks like we'll be back on work schedule until further notice. Do you still have a copy of it?”
”Last time on work schedule was January 19, Year 14, or 2076 Old Dating,” Bob responded, ”and the copy appears to be undamaged. Per that work schedule, shall I put on a full breakfast in addition to the sweet rolls?”
”Do it, Bob.” I went out to the kitchen, dumped my cold coffee, and poured myself some fresh. Strange to be having such a morninga-I had thought I'd never have another one.
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