Part 8 (1/2)

”Yeah, I think so.”

”Good enough.” He raised his gla.s.s. ”My story's not as dramatic, so we're going to need more wine.”

<> Dave's tale didn't take long. He was a foundling in Denver Dome, a few years after I was dropped off at Spokane Domea-we both thought it was pretty funny (with help from the wine) that we theoretically could be brothers. He'd been in a couple of mercenary units before being hired as part of the bodyguard for a Freecyber cell in upstate New York, within fifty miles of where I was stalking Murphy's Comsat Avengers.

He'd liked working for the Freecybersa-he said they were pleasant employers, met their bills, didn't ask for the impossible, treated you like peoplea-but it came to an abrupt end when Murphy's unit overran them and butchered the people they were guarding. ”No call for it, either,” he said. ”They could have just turned them. It was pretty close to the end of the war. Could've just put One True into them, and I bet that's what One True would have preferred. Murphy's was the only mercenary company I ever heard of that regularly killed just for fun; it was like a whole outfit of serial killers.”

I nodded and took a big slurp of the wine, which was absolutely delicious. ”Yeah. You know where Murphy came from? He was nothing more than an old vag at the time the war broke out. There probably weren't two thousand vags left on the planet in 2049, but unfortunately, he happened to be one of them.”

Dave shrugged. ”I knew a couple of former vags, myself. One of them and I went sniping a few times, because he was so crazy he'd go show himself on the skyline to draw firea-he lasted about a week, I think. All the old vags I knew were crazy. Most of them were people who just never got over losing something, and spent their lives in the woods, robbing and looting, trying to get it back, pathetic crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who were dangerous to anyone they ran into, but otherwise not anything much to worry about. Murphy was something else again entirely, a lot more than just crazy. He was about as evil and sick a b.a.s.t.a.r.d as the poor old world has ever seen and it's a good thing his delusions made him too incompetent to get anywhere.”

”Amen,” I said, and extended my gla.s.s in a toast; we clinked them together, and I said, ”I saw him die. You could call it a mixed pleasure. I had always hoped to get the f.u.c.ker myself, and the first time I was about to get a good shot at him, two of his own men did it. The three of them were out in front of his tent, talking about what to do now that peace was here, and he was going on in some crazy riff about putting the comsats back upa-like anyone needs them with the supras there. Then he grabbed one of them by the s.h.i.+rt, and the other one shot him. I was so startled that I m.u.f.fed my first shot at one of them, so they both got away.”

Dave nodded firmly. ”You at least got in a good try at them. Me, once Freecyber was gone, I didn't have any side in the war, so I just went into the bush. Here's a strange thought. I didn't have nearly as much grudge against One True as you did, and if One True had made me the offer to become a cowboy huntera-even without being memed, just hunting cowboys in exchange for my keepa-I might have taken it. And from what you tell me, if you hadn't run into Mary on that road, you might have drifted into cowboying, or whatever it was called up the Northeast. We could've been on switched sides. Funny how life cuts.”

”Yeah,” I said. The warm water and the wine were getting a dead solid grip on me, and I was fading fast. ”I'm starting to think of bed,” I admitted.

”Me too, Currie. Let's drink up. There's not much left of these bottles.”

There wasn't much left of his; there was about a quarter of mine, but I pounded it right down like a dumba.s.s teenager anyway. He took my gla.s.s, reached to an overhead shelf, and handed me a bar of soap. ”Oatmeal soap, for rich ladies to scrub their dingy skin with,” he said cheerfully. ”Don't worry about it making you pretty, it didn't make them pretty.” He guffawed at his own joke and I did too; we were pritnear as drunk as I've ever been. When he got out to soap up, he nearly fell, and I got out very slowly; it's not easy when you're holding a bar of soap in one hand, and you really wish you had both hands to hang onto the floor with.

We both soaped up all over, working up thick lather in our hair and beards. A couple of knotted, crusty scars were on the back of my head, which probably meant that whatever Dave had done to the back of my head with his club should have had st.i.tches but hadn't gotten them. Oh, well, I was alive, and not memed, and thinking as myself.

When we had finished lathering, Dave carefully put our pieces of soap back on the shelf, and said, ”Just be sure you don't stay with your head under too long. I can't think that would be real good for a guy with a recent brain trauma.”

We climbed back in, the hot water feeling good after the cool of soaping up, and swished around in the water, getting the soap off and the last kinks out. I let myself slip down and put my head under. In water that's warmer than body temperature, with a skinful of wine, putting your head under hits like a sledgehammer, and you can easily pa.s.s out, but I let myself hang for a moment in that blissful almost-not-there state, so relaxed that my muscles seemed to just blend into the surrounding water. If Dave had wanted to kill me, that moment then would have been a good time; I'd probably have slipped over to the other side without caring.

But clearly he didn't. I suppose decades without a friend do things to a man; the thing that seemed strangest to me was that he was still fairly good at getting along with people, after all that loneliness.

I let the warmth fill my whole body, then sat back up, splas.h.i.+ng and wiping the water from my face. ”I don't suppose you've gota-”

”But of course,” he said. ”I built my towel closet with racks that carry hot water. All towels are always dry, fluffy, and hot.”

”d.a.m.n, you know how to live.” I got out and he tossed me a towel; I dried myself thoroughly. It felt good to be alive. ”Dave, if you don't want to be turned, I am not going to turn you. And since you can't trust me if I'm turned, I guess I'm out in the woods for good, myself. You'll have to teach me most of the mechanics of living out here, and I'll have to depend on you for a while, but I'll construct a place of my own, if you prefer, just as fast as I can. And I guess we both have to move, anyway, because there's bound to be some of them looking for me in a couple-few weeks, once some of the spring melt has happened, plus of course they had enough uploads from my copy of Resuna, the last few days before you caught me, to have you pritnear dead solid located.”

Dave sighed. ”Well, we're both in a sloppy sentimental mood. Been a long time since I've had a partner, and living out in the woods without anybody else is lim, lim hard. But you gotta think about things like the fact that you wouldn't see Mary again, ever, probably, and I got to think about whether I'm letting my feelings blind me. So let's sleep on it, get up late, talk it over a you know, the usual kind of thing you do when you know what you want to do, but you want to be sure you want to. You know?”

”If I had a few more brain cells running I'm sure that would be perfectly clear,” I said. ”Sure, see you in the morning.”

He didn't even lock my door; I had the funny thought, as I fell asleep, that I might be about to become a cowboy, but I sure as h.e.l.l wasn't ever going to put any dumba.s.s-looking Stetson on.

<> Next morning the menu was jerked venison, canned beans, pickled grouse eggs, strong coffee, and plenty of aspirin. We didn't say much till we got enough of all that stowed in our guts so that we felt sort of human, and then we took a vote and it was unanimous that we ought to go take a nap. It must've been another three hours before we staggered out, guts stabilized, heads only oppressively fuzzy instead of overwhelmingly thick, and had some more coffee, plus some jackrabbit stew he'd canned the summer before. ”Well,” Dave said at last, ”that was one h.e.l.l of an evening. Haven't had a blowout like that in decades, literally.”

”Me either,” I said. ”Felt pretty good, even if I wouldn't want to do it more than four or five times in a year. To let you know, I still think I'd rather throw in with you. I'd rather be your friend than not, and this is the only way to be your friend. As for Mary, yeah, I miss her, and she has some good qualities and so forth, but you know, there's a whole lot of energy that has gone into taking care of her, and much as I hate to admit it, I'd have decided she wasn't worth it, probably within a few weeks, if Resuna hadn't been steering my thoughts. So I'm about twenty-five years overdue for an awakening from the romance, and though I wish her all the best, and though I would gladly take care of her just out of duty, and enjoy her company a well, Resuna will take very good care of her, and she'll be just fine. I'm leaving her in a situation much safer and more comfortable than I ever left Tammy in. So if you'll take me on, and teach me enough of what you know, I'd be happy to be your neighbor out here, or your partner if you don't mind sharing quarters. I'll do more than my share of the work to make up for not supplying my share of the knowledge.”

Dave sat back in his chair, put two more aspirin in his mouth, took another gulp of coffee to wash them down, and said, ”You worry way too much about what's fair, and about my privacy, Currie. I'd dearly love to have a partner. With two of us working we can make our new place big enough to have rooms for both of us. I know you'll pull your freight. And if you are just going to turn me in, well, that idea is so discouraging that I'd just as soon not think or worry about it at all, so I'm not.” He stuck his hand out, we shook, and we were partners.

That afternoon we got going on the subject of where to move and when. Over his years of wandering around in the mountains, Dave had picked out several other places with easy-to-tap geothermal heat, none with as abundant a flow as this one. ”Two of them have a sizable surface pool nearby, so if the temperature on that was to start to drop, it's just possible a satellite would spot the difference between how hot the pool used to be and how hot it was now. If they've found this place by then, well, then they'd know my basic way of surviving, they'd be looking for changes around hot springs, and we'd be in deep s.h.i.+t. Out of all the hot springs sites I've found, there's only one that drains back into the ground without breaking the surface and flowing down to some creek. It's on the leeward side of Ute Ridge, a little ways up, in a cave that's probably an earthquake crack that got weathered out bigger and then had some runoff flowing through it at one timea-there's a slide up above that I figure must have turned off the flow. There's some room in there and plenty of stuff solid enough to dig out for more as we need ita-though it's not going to be the pleasant easy digging that this old mine gave me. And so far, anyway, checking that spring for years, it hasn't gone dry or surged up. Problem is, it's reliable but it ain't plentifula-there's maybe half a gallon per minute or so, enough to give us heat and some hot water, but nothing like the four and a quarter gallons per minute I got here.”

”We could put in a tank of some kind, couldn't we?” I pointed out. ”The longer we keep the hot water hanging around, the more heat we can extract. We couldn't have an ever-running hot tub-laundromat-dishwasher like you've got here, but we could just do all the was.h.i.+ng in s.h.i.+fts; wash and rinse with water from the hot tank, drain it into a warm tank that keeps the place comfortable, put it through the toilet and then discharge it room temperature if you've got a safe hole to put it down.”

I had to draw a couple of sketches of the idea for hima-I was mildly surprised at the way the idea didn't seem natural to a man who had built a place as ingenious as this onea-but once he got it, he nodded vigorously and added, ”I think you've already paid for yourself, Curran. That's a great idea. Far as I know, after it pa.s.ses through that little cave, the stream runs underground for miles, tooa-no surface pool anywhere neara-so even if we take all the heat from that water, and discharge at room temperature, betcha we still don't show up to the satellites.”

”I guess that's what we are betting on,” I agreed.

<> Two days later I saw daylight for the first time in what I discovered had been nineteen days. Dave's camouflage for the entrance was simplicity itselfa-it was under an overhang and led onto a long sloping shelf of south-facing dark rock, which must have stayed pretty free of snow most of the time. We walked straight out during one of the no-satellite times, got under the trees, and put on skisa-his were old Fibergla.s.s models; I just used my flexis. After a moment or two to check equipment, we were on our way.

I was a hair rocky on my skis, at first, and we took it slow, going the long way round because it was much more nearly level. It was another beautiful, cloudless, deep blue sky above pure white snow. By the third kilometer or so, I was back in the swing of things, annoyingly short of muscle after all the bed rest, but fundamentally fine.

You had to be practically falling into the little cave before you even saw the wisps of steam, or the donut of ice like a giant's a.n.u.s, among the scrubby firs. The opening was an irregular oval, perhaps four feet long by two across. ”Getting in's not as hard as getting out,” Dave said. ”The floor's not far down, and it opens up beyond this point. Just follow me.” He set his skis down under the tree, and I did the same; then he braced a hand on either side of the gla.s.sy ice of the opening, and more or less swung down into the s.p.a.ce, coming to a rest when he was in about up to the bottom of his ribcage. ”Tricky spot. This part of the floor is covered with ice,” he said. ”Have to figure out a faster entrance eventually. Now squat, hope not to fall down, turn real slowly left, stick your legs out, and slide down a slope on your b.u.t.t. You'll skid down maybe seven-eight foot and land on a pile of scree. I'll be down there with a light.”

He squatted and I heard a sc.r.a.ping sound, a louder and different scrabbling noise, and then finally a crash of spraying gravel, followed by the rattle of him climbing off the scree pile. ”Okay, I'm down. Just come to the light.”

If possible, the ice around the opening was slicker than it looked, and wetter. My head seemed to ache as if waiting to be slammed. Gingerly, I put my feet down and found the slick, icy floor; I could see a trace of glare from his flashlight on my boots, coming from my left.

”Doing fine,” he said.

Very slowly, keeping my weight right over my feet, I crouched and turned. I was in a s.p.a.ce less than a meter high and not much wider than the hole on the surface; beside me Dave's light came up from a crack that was about a meter wide and not more than two feet high, into which the floor sloped. I put my feet down the opening and pushed off, hoping that Dave hadn't worked out some incredibly complicated way to cause a cowboy hunter to die where he'd never be found.

The freezing-cold rock and ice chewed at my a.s.s for an instant. With a momentary lurch, I gained speed. My boots grabbed the scree pile and I finished up squatting on that. Dave was standing there, adjusting his flashlight for use as a lantern. I climbed down carefully and stood beside him.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that we were in a big crack in the native granite. It was surprisingly free of dirt, and almost unpleasantly warm. I opened up my suit as Dave took off his jacket. ”Well, here it is,” he said. ”Prospective home.”

In the dim light I could clearly see the basic s.p.a.cea-about seven meters that I could see, ending in a bend at one end, varying from two to three meters wide, all high enough so you could walk without b.u.mping your head. A thin trickle of warm water dribbled across the muddy floor, steam rising from it. ”It's also hotter than what I've got in the home place now,” Dave said, ”which I think means your idea will work even better.”

I walked forward and looked to see that the trickle of water emerged from an opening that I could probably have put my arm into, if I'd wanted it scalded. ”We could widen and break this out,” I said, ”or just stick a pipe into it. Probably start with just the pipe and then expand toward the heat, eh?”

”Sounds logical to me,” Dave said. ”There's a chamber around the bend, where the hole that drains this is.”

Gingerly, I made my way through that main gallery, following Dave, watching where I put my feet, not caring to dip my boots in the near-boiling trickle. Around the corner, in the short leg of the L-shaped cave, where Dave's lantern shone, we moved into a chamber about two meters square and some inches deeper than the gallery we'd left; the ceiling was higher too, and the hot trickle bit deep into the clay soil floor, vanis.h.i.+ng toward the end of the room in a gurgling hiss of steam. ”I've probed down that hole, and about a meter below, it seems to widen,” Dave said. ”We might could try a video camera and monitor, and a light, and see if there's a usable chamber down there to dig to, or even just a good place for one of your storage tanks.”

”Seems promising,” I said. ”You ever done anything to find out how deep the clay is anywhere in here?”

”Naw. Wasn't high enough priority till now. For all I know when we dig it out we'll turn up ten more foot of headroom and entrances to six more chambers. Anyway, that's about all there is to it right now. What do you think?”

I looked at it and thought about how hard I was going to have to work; then about Mary and the cabin; then about what it was like to be awake, in my own skull, without Resuna watching every thought, and I said, ”This is gonna sound stupid but I can hardly wait to get started. I guess we bring up the shovels tomorrow, and we start mucking out.”

”Makes sense, if you're ready.”

”Oh, I'm ready,” I said. ”And here's another thought. We don't have to haul the dirt out and dribble it from a pack. All this clay was carried here by the spring, right? So if we just build a box with a screen on the bottom, that the stream runs through on its way out, and drop the dirt in there, it will be carried downstream underground, where n.o.body's going to see it. We might see about mucking out the drain first thing, just to see if we can do it that waya-because if we can, that makes the whole job simpler. We can be here digging more of the time and we won't be limited by how much dirt we can hide.”

”What happens if we put so much down there that we plug something up, and it starts to back up into the cave?” Dave asked.

”Then we poke down there with poles and rods, and see if we can smash something to let the water outa-and if that doesn't work, we see how far it fillsa-and if it fills to the top, well, we tunnel in from the side and let it out. Which admittedly kills the advantage of the subterranean drain. But anyway, we've got so much to gain if we can move a few tons a day, instead of a few packloads. We could have a whole new place here inside a year or two if we can wash most of the clay down, instead of carrying it. Wouldn't you say?”

He shrugged. ”Partner, I never thought of that either. I'm just not much of a planner or engineer; purely an improviser and an improver. It's probably a good thing I was the cowboy and you were the hunter, because you d.a.m.n near caught me, and I don't think I'd've stood a prayer of catching you.”

”Different approaches,” I said. ”If you and me were hunting a cowboy together, I'd be amazed at how many things were obvious to you, I bet, that I never saw.”

”Might could be,” Dave said. ”Might could be.”