The gentle voice had a perfect human timbre. It came from a speaker set on the end of the oak table. Gordon sat in a padded chair Peter Aage offered. There was a pause. Then Cyclops spoke again.
“The tidings you bring are joyous, Gordon. After all these years caring for the people of the lower Willamette Valley, it seems almost too good to be true.”
Another brief hiatus, then, “It has been rewarding, working with my friends who insist on calling themselves my ‘Servants.’ But it has also been lonely and hard, imagining the rest of the world to lie in ruins.
“Please tell me, Gordon. Do any of my brothers still survive in the East?”
He had to blink. Finding his voice, Gordon shook his head. “No, Cyclops. I’m very sorry. None of the other great machines made it through the destruction. I’m afraid you are the last of your species left alive.”
Though he regretted having to give it the news, he hoped it was a good omen to be able to start out by telling the truth.
Cyclops was silent for a long moment. Surely it was only his imagination when Gordon thought he heard a faint sigh, almost like a sob.
During the pause, the tiny parity lights below the camera lens went on flashing, as if signaling over and over again in some hidden language. Gordon knew he had to keep talking, or lose himself in that hypnotic pattern. “Uh, in fact, Cyclops, most of the big computers died in the first seconds of the war — you know, the electromagnetic pulses. I can’t help being curious how you yourself survived it.”
Like Gordon, the machine seemed to shake aside a sad contemplation in order to answer.
“That is a good question. It turns out that my survival was a fortunate accident of timing. You see the war broke out on Visitor’s Day, here at OSU. When the pulses flew, I happened to be in my Faraday cage for a public demonstration. So you see…”
Interested as he was in Cyclops’s story, Gordon felt a momentary sense of triumph. He had taken the initiative in this interview, asking questions exactly as a “federal inspector” would. He glanced at the sober faces of the human Servants, and knew he had won a small victory. They were taking him very seriously indeed.
Maybe this would work out, after all.
Still, he avoided looking at the rippling lights. And soon he felt himself begin to sweat, even in the coolness near the superchilled pane of glass.
8
In four days the meetings and negotiations were over. Suddenly, before he had really prepared himself, it was time to leave again. Peter Aage walked with Gordon, helping him carry his two slim saddlebags toward the stables where his mounts were being readied.
“I’m sorry it took so long, Gordon. I know you’ve been anxious to get back to work building your postal network. Cyclops only wanted to fix up the right itinerary for you, so you can swing through north Oregon most efficiently.”
“That’s all right, Peter,” Gordon shrugged, pretending. “The delay wasn’t bad, and I appreciate the help.”
They walked for a time in silence, Gordon’s thoughts a hidden turmoil. If Peter only knew how much I would have preferred to stay. If only there were a way …
Gordon had come to love the simple comfort of his guest room, across from the House of Cyclops, the large and pleasant commissary meals, the impressive library of well-cared-for books. Perhaps most of all he would miss the electric light by his bed. He had read himself to sleep each of the last four nights, a habit of his youth, quickly reawakened after long, long dormancy.
A pair of tan-jacketed guards tipped their hats as Gordon and Aage turned the corner of the House of Cyclops and started across an open field on their way to the stables.
While he waited for Cyclops to prepare his itinerary, Gordon had visited much of the area around Corvallis, talking with dozens of people about scientific farming, about simple but technically advanced crafts, and about the theory behind the loose confederation that made for Cyclops’s peace. The secret of the Valley was simple. No one wanted to fight, not when it might mean being left out of the cornucopia of wonders promised someday by the great machine.
But one conversation, in particular, stuck in his head. It had been last night, with the youngest Servant of Cyclops, Dena Spurgen.
She had kept him up late by the fire in the commissary, chaperoned by two of her girl emissaries, pouring cups of tea until he sloshed, pestering him with questions about his life before and after the Doomwar.
Gordon had learned many tricks to avoid getting too specific about the “Restored United States,” but he had no defense against this sort of grilling. She seemed far less interested in the thing that excited everyone else, contact with the “rest of the nation.” Clearly, that was a process that would take decades.
No, Dena wanted to know about the world just before and after the bombs. She was especially fascinated by that awful, tragic year he had spent with Lieutenant Van and his militia platoon. She wanted to know about every man in the unit, his flaws and foibles, the courage — or obstinacy — that made him continue to fight long after the cause was lost.
No… not lost. Gordon had reminded himself just in time to invent a happy ending to the Battle of Meeker County. The cavalry came. The granaries were saved at the last minute. Good men died — he spared no details of Tiny Kielre’s agony, or Drew Simms’s brave stand — but in his tale their struggles were not for nothing.
He told it the way it should have ended, feeling the wish with an intensity that surprised him. The women listened with rapt attention, as if it were a wonderful bedtime story — or as if it were critical data and they were going to be tested on it in the morning.
I wish I knew exactly what it was they were hearing — what they were trying to find in my own small, grimy tale.
Perhaps it was because the Lower Willamette had been at peace for so long, but Dena had also wanted to know about the worst men he had met, as well… everything he knew about the looters and hyper-survivalists and Holnists.
The cancer at the heart of the end-of-the-century renaissance … I hope you are burning in Hell, Nathan Holn.
Dena kept asking questions even after Tracy and Mary Ann had fallen asleep by the fire. Normally, he would have been aroused by such close, admiring attention from an attractive woman. But this was not the same as it had been with Abby, back in Pine View. Dena had not seemed uninterested in him that way, to be sure. It was just that she seemed much more intensely involved in his value as a source of information. And if he was only to be here for a few days, she was completely unhesitant in choosing how best to use the time.
Gordon found her, all in all, overpowering and maybe a bit obsessed. Yet he knew that she would be unhappy to see him go.
She was probably the only one. Gordon had the distinct feeling that most of the other Servants of Cyclops were happy to be rid of him. Even Peter Aage seemed relieved.
It’s my role, of course. It makes them nervous. Perhaps, deep inside, they sense some falseness. I couldn’t really blame them.
Even if the majority of the techs believed his story, they had little reason to love a representative of a remote “government” certain to meddle — sooner or later — in what they had spent so long building. They talked about eagerness for contact with the outside world. But Gordon sensed that many of them felt it would be an imposition, at best.
Not that they really had anything to fear, of course.
Gordon still wasn’t sure about the attitude of Cyclops itself. The great machine who had taken responsibility for an entire valley had been rather tentative and distant during their later interviews. There had been no jokes or clever puns, only a smooth and involute seriousness. The coolness had been disappointing after his memory of that prewar day in Minneapolis.