Part 9 (1/2)

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.”