It made good fertilizer. So would the dead. Battle Valley would be good cropland next spring. Now it was a slaughterhouse.
We won. Victory. Harvey tried to recall the elation he’d felt the night before, the sense of life he’d had when he woke in the morning, and he knew he’d be able to. This was horrible work, but it was needed. They couldn’t leave the Brotherhood’s wounded to suffer. They’d die soon enough anyway; better to kill them cleanly.
And it was the last. No more wars. Now they could build a civilization. The Brotherhood had done the Stronghold’s work: They had cleared out much of the area near the Stronghold. It wouldn’t take a big expedition to go looking for salvage. Harvey kept his thoughts on that: on what they could find, on the wonders out there that they could search for and bring home.
When he heard the bow, Harvey turned back. His turn. Let Brad be alone for a moment.
The blood typing was done, and she’d visited the wounded. That had been tough, but not as bad as she’d thought. She knew why, but she didn’t think about it.
It wasn’t too bad in the hospital, because the worst cases had already died. Maureen wondered if they’d been… helped. Leonilla and Doc Valdemar and his psychiatrist wife, Ruth, knew their limits, knew that many who had inhaled mustard or taken gut shots were finished because they didn’t have the drugs and equipment it would take to save them, and the mustard cases would end up blind anyway, most of them. Had the doctors been more than choosers of the slain? Maureen didn’t want to ask.
She left the hospital.
In City Hall they were preparing for a party. A victory celebration. And we damned well deserve it, Maureen thought. We can mourn the dead, but we have to go on living, and these people have worked and bled and died for this moment: for the celebration that said the fighting was over, that the Hammer had done its worst and now it was time to rebuild.
Joanna and Rosa Wagoner were shouting with joy. They’d got a lamp burning. “It works!” Joanna said. “Hi, Maureen. We’ve got the lamp burning on methanol.”
It didn’t give off much light, but it would do. At the end of the big central book-lined room some of the children were setting up punch bowls. Mulberry wine, really quite good (well, not too bad); a case of Cokes someone had saved. And there would be food, mostly stew, and you didn’t want to know what was in it. Rats and squirrels weren’t really very different kinds of animals, nor did cat taste much different from rabbit. There wouldn’t be many vegetables in the stew. Potatoes were scarce and terribly valuable. There were oats, though. Two of Gordie Vance’s scouts had come down with oats, carefully separated: the scrawny ones for eating, and the best separated out to be kept as seed. The Sierra was full of wild oats.
And Scotland had built a national cuisine on oats. Tonight they’d find out what haggis tasted like…
She went through the main hall, where women and children were putting up decorations, bright-colored drapes now used as wall hangings, whatever might add a festive air. The Mayor’s office was through a door at the far end.
Her father, Al Hardy, Mayor Seitz and George Christopher were in there with Eileen Hamner. Their conversation stopped abruptly as she entered. Maureen greeted George and got an answer, but he seemed slightly nervous, somehow made to feel guilty in her presence. Or was she imagining it? She wasn’t imagining the silence in the room.
“Go on with what you were doing,” she said.
“We were just talking about… things,” Al Hardy said. “I don’t know if you’d be interested…”
Maureen laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Go on.” Because if you’re going to treat me like a goddam princess, she thought, I can sure as hell learn what’s going on.
“Yes. Well, it’s a bit of an ugly subject,” Al Hardy said.
“So?” She took a seat next to her father. He didn’t look good. He didn’t look good at all, and Maureen knew he wouldn’t live through the winter. The doctors at Bethesda had told her he would have to take things a lot easier — and there was no way he could do that. She put her hand on his arm and smiled, and he returned it. “Tell Al I’ll be all right,” she said.
His smile broadened. “Sure about that, Kitten?”
“Yes. I can do my part.”
“Al,” Jellison said.
“Yes, sir. It’s about the prisoners. What do we do with them?”
“There weren’t many of their wounded in the hospital,” Maureen said. “I’d have thought there would be more — oh.”
Hardy nodded. “The rest are being… taken care of. It’s the forty-one men and six women who surrendered that we’ve got to worry about.” He held up his hand and ticked off points on his fingers. “I see the following alternatives. One. We can take them in as citizens—”
“Never,” George Christopher growled.
“Two. We can take them in as slaves. Three, we can let them go. Four, we can kill them.”
“We don’t let them go, either,” George said. “Let them go, they’ll rejoin the Brotherhood. Where else would they go? And the Brotherhood is still bigger than we are. Don’t forget that. They put up a good fight after the first ten or fifteen miles. They’ve still got leaders, some trucks, mortars… Sure, we captured a lot of their weapons, but they’re still out there.” He grinned wolfishly. “But I bet they don’t ever stick their noses our way again.” Then he looked thoughtful. “Slaves. I can think of a lot we could do with slaves.”
“Yes.” Hardy nodded agreement. “So can I. Brute labor. Turning compressor pumps so we can have refrigeration. Musclepower for hand lathes. Grinding lenses. Even pulling plows. There’s a lot of work nobody wants to do—”
“But slavery?” Maureen protested. “That’s horrible.”
“Is it? Would you like it better if we call it imprisonment at hard labor?” Hardy asked. “Would their lives be so much worse than they were as part of the Brotherhood? Or worse than convicts in prisons before the Hammer?”
“No,” Maureen said. “It’s not them I’m thinking of. It’s us. Do we want to be the kind of people who keep slaves?”
“Then let’s kill ’em and get it over with,” George Christopher said. “Because we’re sure as hell not going to just turn them loose. Inside or outside.”
“Why can’t we just let them go?” Maureen demanded.
“I already told you,” George said. “They’ll go back to the cannibals—”
“Is the Brotherhood all that dangerous now?” Maureen asked.
“Not to us,” Christopher said. “They won’t come here again.”
“And by spring there won’t be many of them left, I suspect,” Al Hardy added. “They don’t have much organization for winter. Or if they do, the ones we captured don’t know about it.”
Maureen fought the feeling that threatened her. “It’s all pretty horrible,” she said.
“What can we afford?” Senator Jellison asked. His voice was low; conserving energy. “Civilizations have the morality and ethics they can afford. Right now we don’t have much, so we can’t afford much. We can’t take care of our own wounded, much less theirs, so all we can afford to do for theirs is put them out of their misery. Now what can we afford to do with the other prisoners? Maureen’s right, we can’t let ourselves become barbarians, but our abilities may not be up to our intentions.”
Maureen patted her father’s arm. “That’s what I figured out, somewhere in the last week. But — if we can’t afford much, then we have to build so that we can! What we don’t dare do is get used to evil. We have to hate it, even if we can’t do anything else.”