"However, a really good try ultimately makes no difference; only success makes a difference. And it so happens the world still needs saving, and with you guys, and Monica, and a certain amount of plain old luck, that's just what I'm going to do."

The way he smiled at them made Dave feel safe and happy, but something about his tone thrilled the little boy to the bonea-it was as if he'd been personally sworn in by Batman or Earth Ranger.

Phil's explanation for what he was going to do with them was necessarily simple, because he was talking to a group of quite young children. As they grew, he re-explained and re-explained, and their ability to understand it all increased. Since he often used the same phrases in the process, and so many times the explanation happened in the same rooms, in later years it was very hard for Dave to sort out what he had been told whena-his earlier memories were overlaid by later ones and tied into them almost seamlessly.

Furthermore, when he explained it to me in the cave, as we dug, he told me about it as the ideas occurred to him, not necessarily in the best order for understanding, so there's not much hope of disentangling it and telling the whole story of Phil and Monica Comasus, the Big House, the kids themselves, the Freecybers, or any of the rest, as anyone experienced it. The best I can do is give a fairly accurate, sorted-out explanation, but you have to keep in mind, that's not how the kids met up with it. For Dave, as an adult, it was as much a part of him as speaking English.

Comasus was the originator of the system called CSL education. CSL stood for Cybernetics, Semiotics, and Logic, and it could be described several different waysa-as an academic subject in its own right that no one else had realized was needed before, as an abstract stratum underlying every other kind of learning, as a set of techniques that a kid learned to accelerate learning in all fields. Phil alternated between saying he'd invented it and he'd discovered it, sometimes saying that he'd come up with a way for the three older disciplines to easily transfer ideas between them, and sometimes saying that he'd found out that a twentieth-century mathematician, two nineteenth-century polymaths, and a bunch of ancient Greeks and medieval scholastics had all been working on the same problem, and that the answers fit together into a grand idea that made the human brain work better.

The basic trick was simple enough: there are a few fundamental patterns to ideasa-different patterns for different cla.s.ses of verbal, visual, emotional, mathematical, and so fortha-and a way of learning that goes with each pattern. Furthermore, each of the couple of dozen fundamental patterns has a specific relation to every other fundamental pattern. Master the pattern through repet.i.tion, drill, re-experiencing it from a variety of different perspectives and contextsa-just as children master words, grammatical structures, dramatic plots, moves in games, or moral notions, by working with them over and over in different situationsa-and eventually you have the ability to recognize it wherever you meet it, including in the process of learning all other subjects. Master the fundamental connections and now you are ready to relate and connect new ideas creatively, almost from the moment you understand them.

Later, you learn the master pattern that explains how each pattern applies to each subject matter, and why each kind of learning works best for it; by the time you're ten or so, you know how to learn anything, quickly and with no more effort than necessary. (It helps a great deal that your learning ability has been accelerating right along, so that you do have a deep acquaintance with all sorts of basic material; besides mastering how to learn, you also master a lot of plain old-fashioned learning, just as anybody who is studying the piano, in the process of perfecting technique, also plays the piano a lot, and develops a very big repertoire.) The CSL education plan allows most kids, by age fourteen, to reach about the intellectual level of a senior in an ordinary college, and to a.s.sume adult responsibilities, at least if they want to or society has any need for them to do so.

"Most of the stupidity, hostility, and bad behavior of adolescence comes from being held in a state of enforced uselessness for anywhere from five to ten years," Phil used to say, revealing how old he was, since neither Earth nor the s.p.a.ce colonies had been able to afford that sort of adolescence for most people in the five decades since the Eurowar. Most of us born in this past century can't believe that there was ever a time or place "when a seventeen-year-old's main focus was his or her social life, jobs were for "spending money" rather than self-support, and schooling was deliberately paced so that the dumber students wouldn't need to suffer discomfort or put forth extra effort. I wonder what people back then were thinkinga-or if.

<> "Uh, what was this guy Comasus's real name?" I asked Dave.

He laughed for a second. "You know, we were all taught so thoroughly to never speak it, it just doesn't come natural to say it out loud." He shook his head and said, "But it can't matter now. The man is dead, has been dead for more than thirty years."

Then he told me the name.

"Come on," I said.

"It was."

"I thought he was one of the people a.s.sa.s.sinated in the early '30s, back during that wave of random terror that just seemed to be taking out everyone known to have any brains or talent," I said. "In fact I'm almost sure he was one of them."

"He was," Dave said, "or rather that was the story that was given out. By the time I knew him, he was hiding behind something like ten different aliases and had an elaborate system for keeping himself from being found. He had the money to do it because he had many patents and copyrights under false names, signed over to dummy corporations, and I don't know what alla-one huge money-hiding machine, laced with dozens of dead ends and false continuers and telltales, that filtered goods down to him. When I knew him he'd already been hiding for more than fifteen years from something he called the *Organization.' Never knew him to speak of it without a shudder. As far as I know, it never had any other name than that, either, just the Organization. I couldn't make out if it was a gang of spies or crooks or mercenaries, or just kind of a group of evil people, but Phil Comasus was the sanest man I ever met, and he was scared to death of it.

"What he said was that when the Organization tried to kill him, they broke into his house, killed his first wifea-hacked her to pieces in front of him, to tell you the trutha-gave him a ma.s.sive psycholytic injection that should have left him a madman for the rest of his life, beat him hard enough to break a dozen bones, rupture a kidney, and puncture both lungs, poured gasoline on him, set a fire upstairs that killed his kids, left him for dead a and sometime between them leaving and the fire burning its slow way downstairs, he revived enough to crawl out onto the street. Somebody picked him up from there and admitted him to a hospital as a John Doe. With the fire and the mess, the cops couldn't figure out how many people had died in that house, and came up one high.

"After he came to, and figured out what was up, he realized that the Organization must think he was dead, and from then on he did his best to make sure they continued to think so. But when the cutting's done and the pieces are laid, you know, nothing really stops people like the Organization. A long time after that, they found out who he was and where he was, and killed him and Monica. That's later in the story."

"You're sure it was this Organization and not just someone at random? I thought you said it was soldiers from Murphy's."

"There might have been no connection," Dave said, "except a long time latera-well, maybe just a few years, it might have been around Year Three, when I was putting together my group of cowboysa-I met up with this one cowboy, guy who called himself Gregor, who wanted to join. He said he'd been in Murphy's Comsat Avengers. Gregor was a loner, and it didn't take too long to figure out that his reason for hiding out was not a love of freedom or some principle. He'd have been hiding from any society, because, at least in my estimation, the guy was either a serial killer already, or he was going to be. I turned him down. Then a couple of months later, me and two of my cowboys came across Gregor in a deserted small town, where he'd found a family hiding out in an old grocery store, and was *using them up,' which was his expression for spending a few days doing G.o.dawful things while he killed them off one at a time. He had just killed the father when we got there. Well, you know, justice is rough out here in the woods, so me and my cowboys gave him a real thorough beating to help him tell us the truth, because we wanted to know whether the man had any accomplices, and just what the h.e.l.l he intended by committing the sort of crime that endangered every person who was still living free.

"Somewhere in the course of the beating, just about the point where he was about to break, I guess, and grasping at anything to make himself hold on, Gregor told us that he belonged to the Organization, and that we had better let him go if he knew what was good for us, because the Organization always avenged its own.

"After that, I just kept kicking him till he pa.s.sed out, put a small demolition charge under his chin, taped his head down, and set off the charge. Made a h.e.l.l of a mess but I was pretty p.i.s.sed off and I guess I rationalized it by figuring it would make an example of him for any others there might be around, and if he really was with the Organization, it would get them after mea-which was fine with me, I'd love to have more of them show up. More chances for revenge for Phil and Monica, you know," he said. "Anyway, this guy Gregor was a monster. When I die I'm going to have two big regrets about life, and they're both going to be about getting somewhere too late. One of them's not coming across that cowboy before he'd killed the father and one of the children in that family; in a better world, I guess I'd have come across him during the war, and shot his d.a.m.ned head off before he ever got loose among the cowboys."

"And your other big regret?" I asked, keeping the story rolling, I hoped, giving us both an excuse to not dig more clay just immediately.

"I'm getting to that one. Another sandwich?"

"Yeah." I accepted it gratefully, and he got on with that part of the story.

<> For most of the 2050s, while the War of Papal Succession became the War of the Memes and became steadily nastier, Dave had the best years of his life. Those years while he was growing up were a busy, demanding, challenging time, but a very happy one. The war went on and the glaciers grew; Antarctica lost its ice and Scotland disappeared under an ice sheet; memes were created, mutated, grew, got control of a large part of the human race; guys a few years older than Dave, like me, spent the decades fleeing or pursuing, ducking or shooting back. The world got uglier and nastier, the memes that had begun as weapons took over the war for their own purposes, and life in the Big House went on.

Dave got his growth early, and was big for sixteen. The other kids had been quietly vanishing as they got to about that age, so it came as no surprise to Dave, Prester, and Joey when Phil called them in and told them what their part in things would be; by that time, the only time they saw the older ones was when one of them would come back for a brief few days to rest, recover, and get another outside mission from Phil and Monica.

"My last disciples," Phil said, grinning. "At least for a while, until we're in whatever the next historical period turns out to be, and I figure out what else the world might need. Has anyone who's gone on an outside mission ever told you what they do out there?"

The three boys shook their heads, and Phil smiled. "Well, I guess it wasn't really secret, but they probably get a habit of being very discreet out there, and it's probably good that they have the habit. All right, here's the story; here's why I grabbed you out of those orphanages and put you through CSL education at a time when I'd rather have been spending my time sensibly hiding with Monica, waiting to get old and die."

"You're not going to die," Prester blurted out.

"Oh, sooner or later," Phil said, "but only on one day out of all of the billions of years of time. That should tell you how negligible the "whole business is. Sooner or later the Organization will find out that I'm alive and where I am, or I'll get sick with something that requires DNA validation to treat, which I don't dare do since it would be like publishing my fingerprints, or I'll just fall downstairs and whack my head on the bal.u.s.trade. Not today, probably, and I expect to be here when you all come back to visit. But I'm afraid the visits won't be often, for a while, because these next few years we're going to be very busy."

Phil explained a little of what the others were up to; all were in some covert role, some in very deep cover, which was why they hadn't been seen since they'd left. "Who got what job depended mostly on my guess as to how well they'd handle the loneliness," Phil said. Five of the former students were working their way up one hierarchy or another, becoming important in military, financial, or church positions; four were out making "adjustments." That was what Cecile and Julie had departed to do, just a few months before, their youth carefully concealed by makeup and padding. "I wish we'd had more time to prep them," Phil said, "and to let them have time to grow adult bodies, but adjustments kept getting more urgent, and they were the only ones left to send, since I had to reserve you three for a special mission."

"What do they adjust?" Dave asked, trying to avoid, for the moment, the awareness that there was a special mission for him.

Phil sighed. "When possible, they just do things to cause good people to be promoted, and bad people discredited. They tinker here and there to try to help the war run out of gas, which it's going to do in three to four years at mosta-and we need it to end in a stalemate, between at least five memes, not in a single-meme victory. They meddle in the affairs of different organizations, sending some of them down paths where they'll do more good for humanity, helping the good ones along a every now and then seeing that a bad one breaks up or collapses. Just now, for example, Julie is working a staff job for the army of Real America, up north in Minot, helping them recover their balance and morale so that they can retake Minnesota and roll back One True; down south in Tennessee, Isaac is getting Free American through a minor palace putsch that ought to put an end to their concentration camps and secret police. Sometimes it's a matter of infiltrating and making a few changes or helping someone who's going to make the changes. A lot turns on small differences."

He sighed. "And I guess I really can't conceal from you that every so often they're killing some of the people that are most in the way of progress and success for humanity. Usually very discreetlya-with so many mutant and tailored bugs around, sudden fatal infections just aren't that unusual. Every so often they set up something more public, when that's what will do us the most good, but that always makes me nervous, because you never know where an investigation might lead, and one intervention that just never works is to kill a smart cop or prosecutor who's starting to think that things are more than they seem. So we do less of the messy stuff than you might imagine, and I'm glad of that.

"But you three are in for something very different." Phil looked out the window for a long moment, at the green hills and the forest that came most of the way up to the lawn of the Big House. "The good news is you'll be able to come back here and visit more often than your fellow students. The bad news is that I'm giving you three the toughest job of all."

Dave sat quietly with the others and waited. He had guessed already that this was going to be something to do with the memes; Phil had admitted, several times, that although he'd been perfectly accurate in predicting the beginning of the War of Papal Succession and the deterioration of the Earth as the war wound down to approximating Hobbes's "war of each against all," he hadn't foreseen anything like the memes at all.

"Theoretically I only needed ten people," he said, "to make all the requisite changes, and exert the force that would keep the world out of some of its worst possible tracks. Buta-well, here's where you have to give Monica the credit. She said we needed to have a reserve against the unexpected. So I chose to have three more. And here you are, ready to go. There's a job for you that I could never have guessed we'd need."

Joey spoke up; shy and modest, he rarely spoke, but he usually asked an important question. "So out of the ten, there are five working their way into positions of power, and four of your *adjusters.' That's nine. But you sent out ten."

Phil looked miserably sad; it seemed to put a decade onto him, right there. "It's probably revealing that I told myself, three times, to be sure I told you what had happened to Martha. And I still haven't yet. She was an exec a.s.sistant for the Pacific Rewildernization Corporation on the Big Island, in Hawaii, where they're trying to get some kind of a normal ecology going again; it was a place where we had some hope of getting many really smart people, and their kids, away from the violence, out from between the contesting powers, in sort of an independent republic that would grow naturally out of the settlements of ecological reconstruction specialists. One of the things she was working on was getting them to adopt CSL educationa-we've never had much luck getting people to do that on Earth, because unless it's really an emergency, people really do not want their children to be a great deal smarter, better adjusted, and more competent than they area-even with that carefully planned society in s.p.a.ce, the parental generation totally flipped out when they realized just how obsolete they had made themselves, and if they hadn't been so thoroughly trained and conditioned to accept it, we might have lost the ships to the power struggle between the generations. Down here, with uncontrolled populations, you might provoke ma.s.sacres of the children, or G.o.d knows what else. So the idea was that on the island, we'd have a bunch of smart capable people that we could propagandize into accepting CSL education for their kids, who would let it go on, and we'd finally have at least one really functional society here on Earth."

"What happened to Martha?" Dave asked quietly. He was remembering her laugh, and the way she could run, and thinking of the pictures she had painted that now hung in the front hall; a tall, handsome black girl, with an amazing gift for languages, always willing to help the younger kids; her one visit home, when they'd all had a picnic on the lawn to celebrate and she'd looked completely grown up.

"Raped and shot dead," Phil said. "Then mutilated in some grotesque ways we don't need to talk about. Her body was left on her boss's desk, and any hope of getting CSL education for Hawaii seems to have died with her. My best guess is that she came to the attention of the Organization. (I have long suspected that they're doing what we're doing, but in reverse.) She must have distinguished herself enough to be noticeda-that's why I keep telling people to be good only at the parts of their job that affect larger matters. A patina of ordinary incompetence is probably their best protection." He was quiet for a long time, and so were the three boys.

"Well," Phil said, "it's a bad idea to dwell on everything bad that can happen, as we all know. Let me tell you what I have in mind for the three of you. It will be dangerous and difficult enough; you needn't fear that any of you will be getting a soft ride while others run risks and face difficulties."

It was only years later that Dave realized how odd it was that Phil a.s.sumed that neither he nor Joey nor Prester would have wanted a soft ride.

Phil looked from one to the other and said, "In some ways, it may be I'm asking you to face the biggest fear anyone in the group might have to face. I'm going to ask you all to let me infect you with a meme."

Dave's gut rolled over; he'd had no direct acquaintance with memes, but he knew more than enough about them.

"If it will make you feel better," Phil added, gently, "Monica and I have both been running that meme for four months now, and we can a.s.sure you that we're in charge, not it. The meme is called Freecyber, and Monica developed it from my concepts."

"What's it do?" Prester asked. "I mean, obviously it either didn't take you over, or if it did, it's got you copied perfectly."

"Well, I hope it didn't take me over," Phil said. "And what I run is three copies of Freecyber, all of them interacting. What Freecyber is, is an anti-meme meme. It lives in your brain and doesn't do much unless another meme invades. Then it goes into action and disables the other meme, and eventually builds up your ability to resist another infection. It preserves individuality, if you will. And what I want you guys to do is spread it everywherea-through the territory of every existing meme."

They had to prepare a set of false IDs, and some introductions to places where the three boys could get hired to do computer jocking, and that took the better part of the afternoon, before they were ready to have their last big meal with Phil and Monica and go to bed early so that they could slip away with a few hours of dark left to them. Within weeks, Freecybers were a new enemy all over the globe; virtually every established meme was trying to hunt them down, copy code from them, and find some way to cope with the new compet.i.tor.

<> "Well," I Said, as we took turns smashing the hole in the inner chamber open winder, sledges battering at the now-washed-clean rock, "at least that explains where Freecybers came from and why they had so many variations so fast. Buta-I hope it doesn't offend you to hear me say thisa-I always had the impression that the Freecybers talked a good game, but they seemed to be just as eager as any other meme to take you over."

"That's a pritnear perfect description of what the problem was," Dave agreed, "and it's one that Phil and Monica never really got solved. The idea was supposed to be that Freecybers would allow people to have a much greater liberty in their personal lives and beliefs, but to do that, the Freecybers had to be smart enough to defeat other memes, and had to have a strong empathy for the desire for freedoma-and you know, that combination meant that every generation Phil released, except the last one, always figured out that any freedom the host got was freedom the meme losta-and drew the implicationsa-and became, basically, a sympathetic, patient tyrant. And since Phil was doing it all in ultracompact neurocoding, the Freecybers left people more in command of their abilities, able to exercise initiative, invent, create, do more than just cooperate and behave, and that meant that from the moment that a copy of any version of a Freecyber happened to think of the idea of having power over people, they were more effective compet.i.tors than most other memes out there. Then the other memes would gang up against them, and pirate the neurocode from the Freecybers a and it would be another generation that failed, and Phil and Monica would have to create still another."

For more than two years, Dave slipped in and out of roles and ident.i.ties, moving around the world, sowing each new generation of Freecybers, every time in the hope that this one would be a liberator that did not degrade into a tyrant. Phil's original system of having three Freecybers watch each other in each brain running them had to be abandoned because it took up too much s.p.a.ce; a system in which each Freecyber watched itself in a time-lagged system replaced it. But in each new generation, the Freecyber copies became corrupted and began to seek power and control for themselvesa-forcing Phil and Monica to develop a new generation of Freecybers that could take on and erase or control the last generation of Freecybers.

Phil and Monica worked endlessly on the problem, going short on sleep, worried by how the conflict as a whole was going, visibly aged by the strain every time Dave made it back to the Big House for a new set of memes and some badly needed rest and contemplation. The race was growing more intense as One True pulled ahead of other memes, and as the other memes allied to fight against One True. Freecybers, as a guerrilla insurrection against all sides, were finding it harder and harder to get in or do anything, in most regions, even when they were not corrupted. The risk of getting caught was growing.

"And still I didn't see it coming," Dave said, as he methodically shoveled mud down the hole, the heavy loads splashing into some little pool the trickle of hot water must be making down there. The shadows from the lights up in the corners did strange things on his face; sometimes it looked like a very bitter smile, sometimes like a mask of tragedy, sometimes it was simply half there and staring madly. "I'd been working under all sorts of aliases as a mercenary, and wasn't too bad a soldiera-good enough to fake it through most outfits, most of the time, as needed. The last batch of Freecybers, though, hadn't worked for c.r.a.p against the new One True, and I'd barely gotten away with a whole uncaptured skin. So no matter what, we were in for a rough time."

<> Weeks after it happened, one of the other kids from the Big House dropped Dave a note and let him know that One True had caught Prester and turned him; the date that was given was about right for it to be the explanation of how One True found out where the Big House was.

Dave and Joey had been coming back in to pick up the new, improved version of Freecyber, and the diskster had dropped them off, as had been necessary for the past couple of years, a few miles from the Big House, in a grove of trees. That seemed to haunt Dave, years latera-that if they had just once broken protocol, and come straight in on the diskster, they might have gotten there soon enough.

The black plume of smoke told them before they came over the hill and saw the central part of the house just falling in. They skied down to the house itself, careless of the possibility that they might be shot, and then circled the house once. The wings were in flames, with most floors collapsed already. There was no way to go inside and come out alive, and no trace of Phil or Monica, so they resigned themselves to coming back later, and followed the tracks of the attackersa-it looked like just two of thema-up to the top of the ridge, where it looked as if they had stood and watched the fire for a long time, standing very close together.

Beyond that, the ski tracks ran a couple of miles to where a diskster track showed up.

It was late afternoon before they could safely go into the ruins of the Big House. "The only satisfaction I had," Dave said, "was that they didn't seem to have been tortureda-just some bullets in each of them, where you'd put the shots for a quick kill. Checking with some processors that we had concealed in fireproof boxes, and hooked to the house system, for just such an occasion, we got some fuzzy pictures of the guys who did ita-not enough to track them downa-plus the satisfaction of knowing that as they tried to read our house systems, they were both infected with our little revenge micromeme, which had the nasty trick of waiting a few days and then setting you up to kill someone you were fond of, using all your imagination and skill and resources at hand. So probably a few days or weeks later, Phil and Monica's killers suddenly turned around and did whatever they would think of as the most unforgivable crime possible, to somebody important to them. Or maybe they tried to do it to each other.

"Well, with the Big House gone, I did what we'd planned on for ages. By then the thirteen agents were down to seven, and any messages at all between us were potentially dangerous, but I did put out word out to everyone that the Big House was gone and n.o.body was in charge anymore. Then I got going with the solo plan appointed for me. And that's how I ended up in the Rockies with an underground hideout that was practically a palace, and a military-quality suspended-animation riga-all this was built years before I came out here.

"My job was supposed to be to see how far I could get with organizing a resistance up in the hills, and if that failed, to duck out and go undergrounda-very literallya-for long enough to throw pursuit off completely, then stick my head up and see whether the situation had gotten any better and there was anything I could do."

I dumped another load of clay down the hole and listened to the splash. It must be pretty deep down there, or fast-flowing, or both, considering how much it seemed to be taking without complaint. "So you must've been out here to do the setup before the war even ended, before Resuna, long before One True announced its plans."

"Right. I used power equipment to set everything up, taking a chance that the satellite would see it but figuring that chances were no one would ever check the memory, years later. Then when the time came, I went back, made sure the place was still there and ready, and got far enough away so that I wouldn't lead anyone to it. After that, you pretty much know the resta-I went out and recruited some cowboys, gave them some ideas and some organization, and turned them loose. I guess I'd have felt more dedication to the cause if any of them had been worthwhile people, but, you know, Curran, they weren't. They were the same kind of people that became vags back at the turn of the centurya-grimy losers who couldn't face having lost and wouldn't stop whining, get up off their knees, and get back in the race. The longer I led them, the more I realized there was nothing to lead.

"So finally I decided it was time to end the game, and that was about the time you showed up with your team. I started running a few more risks with my cowboys, and sure enough, one by one, your team caught and turned them, till it was just me. Then I rushed you where I could pull a disappearance. And I decided to just move into the cave to sleep for a decade or so and see what conditions were like when I got back. Hard part was not being able to tell Nancy what was going on."

"You must have married her before you turned cowboy?" "Just after. Call it a fit of sentimentality. You surely must have guessed where I met her."

"Was she one of the other kids from the Big House?" "Bingo. Who else would I have felt comfortable with? And just having her around to talk to made life a h.e.l.l of a lot more tolerable, you know, because she wasn't a half-literate ex-mercenary who only knew how to keep repeating that a man is a man and he's got to be himself, if you see what I mean. I would have taken her, and maybe even Kelly if she was born by then, down into the cave, but I didn't have any spare suspended-animation rigs, and while I was trying to get a line on two of those, Nancy and Kelly got found, caught, and turned. So like it or not, since there wasn't a prayer of rescuing Nancy or Kelly, and I was completely disgusted with cowboys, and I couldn't remotely think of winning my little war, it was time to go to sleep for a decade and see if conditions were any better when I emerged."

I leaned back against the wall, half to scratch my back on some exposed rock, half to work the muscles. "Well, are conditions any better?"

"I've got at least one follower that isn't a maladjusted dumba.s.s," he pointed out.

"Thanks, you're not a maladjusted dumba.s.s yourself."

" *Predate it," he said. "You want to have dinner, bed down, maybe tomorrow we'll go get a cache and bring it in?"

"Anything that isn't a shovel sounds real good right now," I said. "You've got yourself a deal."

Sometimes just a change of abuse makes all the difference to sore muscles. The next day was clear and bright, so we went for the one cache that we could reach easily while staying under cover the whole way. That one turned out to contain, among an enormous quant.i.ty of other things, a bottle of wine, some shampoo, and a few fresh towels, not to mention a badly needed change of underwear. We were most of the day getting it all moved in, but that evening it felt like we might as well hold a partya-the place was still a rabbit hole but with more comfortable rabbits. We splashed around in the hot water, got reasonably clean, toweled off, and settled in for the wine.

We were finishing that off, reflected moonlight was glowing through the hole, and that's when I asked, "So what's your mission now that you're back? And will you be wanting me to enlist in it?"

He coughed with embarra.s.sment and took a swallow of the last of his wine. "Currie," he said, "I really thought you would guess and I wouldn't have to say this, outright, I mean. After Phil and Monica died, I was working for my part of their project, and that meant I was working for the Freecybers. Just what do you think my job was? What does a meme want you to do?"

"Whatever it tells you, doesn't it? I mean the point is obedience, unless you're going to tell me that the last generation Freecybers were different."

"Something more basic than that, Currie. What's the one thing any meme wants you to do?"

I stared at him. "Well, a regular meme wants you to spread it to other people."

"And Freecyber isn't any different, Currie, it just doesn't want to run your life, most of the time, but like any of the others it wants to spread. That's what my copy wants to do."

"You can't be trying to tell me that you're running Freecyber. You don't talk like anybody who runs a meme. You can't mean you're running it right now."

"Right now, sure. It runs in background. Freecyber doesn't talk to me like Resuna does to you, because it doesn't have any means of direct verbal communication, but it's right there in my head, and I always have a strong feeling reminding me that Freecyber needs to propagate."

"Well, but you haven'ta-" That was when I stopped and stared at him, and then realized. "Oh. s.h.i.t. Of course. I was out for all that time, and then when I came back a no Resuna. So you put Freecyber into me while I was unconscious, I guess through my jacka-and then you cooked the jacka-and now here I am running a meme and not even knowing I'm running it." The world was unsteady and it wasn't just from the wine. "s.h.i.t," I said again. "s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, you aren't any better than One True itself, are you?"

I don't think he was expecting me to hit him. I got in a good hard right to the side of his head, a real haymaker, before he even put his guard up, but he was at least as hardheaded as I was. He made my ribs go thud with a hard kick, and then I gave him a jab in the face. In a few seconds we were all over each other, pounding, kicking, slapping, and screaming things, anything to hurt each other, all technique forgotten in the wild imperative to just inflict as much injury as we could. In the middle of it all we were both yelling G.o.dawful stuff about people from each other's stories, Tammy and Mary and Nancy and Phil, in pure shrieks of hatred.

We threw ourselves at each other again and again, slipping on the slick clay, falling into the scalding water, getting slammed against the rocks and dragged on the gravel in the dark, bruised, bleeding, gasping for air. My face was wet with some G.o.dawful mixture of blood, mucus, and tears, and it felt like every tooth in my head was loose, but I didn't care. All I wanted to do was hurt Dave, hurt f.u.c.king Lobo, teach the b.a.s.t.a.r.d not to go building a person's hopes up, making him feel like he had a friend and a partner, and then suddenly throw a story like that at him. I needed to make him rip his f.u.c.king meme back out of my head, have things be what they were supposed to bea-Dave and me out here in the mountains, the last free men on Eartha-and not just be part of the scheme of Freecyber to take over from One True and run the world for itself. He had promised me freedom, and given me a change of jailers, and I was going to kill this sorry-a.s.s penny-ante Judas for it.

I finally calmed down enough to pick up a shovel. By that time I'd gotten tossed and turned around into the dark back of the cave, and only noticed the shovel because it was under my foot. In the dark he couldn't see me coming and I could probably cave his head ina-I crouched, grabbed it, and rushed.

He was lighted by the reflected moonlight through the hole, a sharp half-light half-shadow that made the lighted parts glow and hid the rest in darkness. Then that strange half-apparition got a wild expression that I could just barely see in the moonlight, like a demon mask, and shouted, "Let overwrite, let override," and the shovel fell from my hands and banged on my shins as I fell forward, landing my face in the warm mud. I tried to get up, twice, but barely managed to roll over.

When I woke up, it was daylight. Resuna was back, and Dave was gone; he'd taken his pack, his sleeping bag, and a bunch of supplies. I crawled unsteadily to my feet as Resuna, in a very worried tone, a.s.sured me that it couldn't reach the satellites at all and it thought its cellular jack had been damaged shortly after a non-approved meme had been slipped into my mind.

Anything left in the cave was too heavy to carry, except for my outside suit. It seemed to be missing its boots, and I spent a while looking for them before it occurred to me to check the shelf under the hole. When I climbed up, they weren't there either, but then I poked my head out through the hole and saw that my boots and flexis were lying in the snow, twenty meters away. He'd set it up so I could have them, but I would have to really want them.

I thought about just getting back in the sleeping bag for a while, resting up, and starting the next day, but Resuna pointed out that it could snow overnight, or thanks to all the stress I could come down with a fever or something, and anyway it was still very early in the morning.

I conceded that all this was true.

I put on my outside suit, pulled myself through the hole, c.o.c.ked my feet up so that they didn't trail in the snow, and crawled on hands and knees to my boots. I had a horrible thought that he might have filled them with snow, but it looked like he was only interested in delay, not in crueltya-they were just fine.

Once I got them on, I put on my flexis, which were already set to function as skinny skis, and for the first time in weeks, I switched on the power in the suit. There was nothing I wanted in the cave, so I shoved a couple big armloads of snow into the water-processing reservoir on the suit, wished for poles for a moment, and then skated off, following what I guessed must be Dave's track downhill. This time I knew a lot more about his habits and the country, and though he'd made use of rock, ice, and frozen dirt wherever he could, I followed him easily enough.

I didn't know why I was still following him, but it seemed important. After a while Resuna said, You know, this isn't strictly rational. Wouldn't it make considerably more sense to just find an open meadow, stamp out "help" in the snow, and wait for the diskster to show up? Probably a diskster would show up in half an hour or less. You need to get my cellular jack repaired anyway, before coming back out here after Lobo.

He might be Dave f.u.c.king Treacherous b.a.s.t.a.r.d Singleton to me, but Resuna knew him as Lobo and that was how it was going to refer to him. No, I thought back to it. I am doing something here that I really have to do, and that's all there is to it.

I skied for another mile and became more and more convinced that Dave was just taking a long way around to his old home base. Maybe he needed something from there before running away for good.

If that's where he's going, Resuna said, why don't we signal the satellite and let the people in the diskster know what's up? Once they pick us up, we can go straight on to his cave. You can even be in on the arrest, if you want.

I was angry but I swallowed hard. To be fair, Resuna was, by definition, not human, and could hardly be expected to understand my feelings. I don't want to see my best friend arrested, I thought at it. I couldn't betray him that way. I want to track him down and kill him.

I swear Resuna actually managed to sigh, and said, This really doesn't seem rational.

I shouted out loud, "Resuna, I know what I'm doing! Shut up! Come back when there's something to talk about!"

Resuna shut up. I had skied downhill for two more kilometers, enough to go from pretty sure to dead solid certain he was heading for his old home base, when I started to think about that. The Resuna I had seemed to be a pretty weak sister, somehow. It wasn't controlling anything, it wasn't taking over, it shut up when it was told to a it was like a having a friend in your head, a friend whose judgment might be better than your own.

I thought a question toward my copy of Resunaa-just a general inquiry about what was going ona-and got no response, except that I could feel that Resuna was there, and not happy. "Resuna," I said aloud, "I want to know what's going on."