At first Gordon stumbled, half stunned, as he retreated down the gray-sided meadow. Phil Bokuto had never turned on him that way before, waving a knife, wild-eyed, disobeying orders…
Then Gordon remembered.
I never actually commanded him not to do this, did I? I asked, I pleaded. But I didn’t order him…
Am I completely sure he isn’t right, at that? Do even I, deep inside, believe some of those things Dena and her band of lunatic women are preaching?
Gordon shook his head. Phil was certainly right about one thing — the stupidity of philosophizing on a battlefield. Out here survival was enough of a problem. That other war — the one he had been waging each night in his dreams — would have to wait its turn.
He made his way downslope carefully, clutching his drawn bayonet, the most practical weapon for this kind of weather. Half his men had put aside their rifles and bows for long knives… another trick painfully learned from their deadly, devious enemy.
He and Bokuto had left the rest of the patrol only fifty meters back, but it felt like much more as his eyes darted in search of traps. The whirling snow-devils seemed to take on forms, like the vaporous scouts of a faerie army that had not yet taken sides. Ethereal neutrals in a quiet, deadly war.
Who will take responsibility… ? they seemed to whisper at him. The words had never left Gordon, not since that fateful morning when he had chosen between practicality and a doomed charade of hope.
At least this particular raiding party of Holn survivalists had fared worse than usual, and the local farmers and villagers had done better than anyone would have expected. Also, Gordon and his escort party had been on an inspection tour nearby. They had been able to join the fray at a critical moment.
In essence, his Army of the Willamette had won a minor victory, losing only twenty or so men to five of the enemy. There were probably no more than three or four of this Holnist band left to flee westward.
Still, four of those human monsters were more than enough, even tired and short on ammunition. His patrol only numbered seven now, and help was far away.
Let them go. They’ll be back.
The hoot of a horned owl warbled just ahead of him. He recognized Leif Morrison’s challenge. He’s getting better, Gordon thought. If we’re still alive in a year, it might even sound real enough to fool someone.
He pursed his lips and tried to mimic the call, two hoots in answer to Morrison’s three. Then he dashed across a narrow glade and slid into the gully where the patrol waited.
Morrison and two other men gathered close. Their beards and sheepskin cloaks were coated with dry snow, and they fingered their weapons nervously.
“Joe and Andy?” Gordon asked.
Leif, the big Swede, nodded left and right. “Pickets,” he said tersely.
Gordon nodded. “Good.” Under the big spruce he untied his pack and pulled out a thermos bottle. One of the privileges of rank; he didn’t have to ask permission to pour himself a cup of hot cider.
The others took their positions again, but kept glancing back, obviously wondering what “the Inspector” was up to this time. Morrison, a farmer who had barely escaped the rape of Greenleaf Town last September, eyed him with the simmering look of a man who had lost everything he loved, and was therefore no longer entirely of this world.
Gordon glanced at his watch — a beautiful, prewar chronometer provided by the technicians of Corvallis. Bokuto had had enough time. By now he would be circling back, covering his tracks.
“Tracy’s dead,” he told the others. Their faces blanched. Gordon went on, weighing their reactions. “I guess she was trying to cut around past the bastards and hold them for us. She didn’t ask my permission.” He shrugged. “They got her.”
The stunned expressions turned into a round of seething, guttural curses. Better, Gordon thought. But the Holnists won’t wait for you to remember to get mad next time, boys. They’ll kill you while you’re still deciding whether or not to be scared.
Well practiced by now at the art of lying, Gordon continued in a flat tone. “Five minutes quicker and we might have saved her. As it is, they had time to take souvenirs.”
This time anger battled revulsion on their faces. And burning shame overcame both. “Let’s go after ‘em!” Morrison urged. “They can’t be far ahead!” The others muttered agreement.
Not quickly enough, Gordon judged.
“No. If you boys were sluggish getting here, you’re much too slow to deal with the inevitable ambush. We’ll move up in skirmish line and retrieve Tracy’s body. Then we’re going home.”
One of the farmers — among the loudest demanding pursuit — showed immediate relief. The others, though, glared back at Gordon, hating him for his words.
Stand in line, boys, Gordon thought bitterly. If I were a real leader of men, Id have found a better way to put backbone into you than this,
He put away his thermos, not offering any cider to the others. The implication was clear — that they didn’t deserve any. “Hop to it,” he said as he slung his light pack over his shoulders.
They did move quickly this time, gathering their gear and scrambling out across the snow. Over to the left and right he saw Joe and Andy emerge from cover and take their places on the flanks. Holnists would never have been so visible, of course, but then, they had had a lot more practice than these reluctant soldiers.
Those with unlimbered rifles covered the knife men, who dashed ahead. Gordon easily kept up, just behind the skirmish line. In a minute he felt Bokuto fall in beside him, appearing as if out of nowhere from behind a tree. For all of their earnestness, none of the farmers had spotted him.
The scout’s expression was blank, but Gordon knew what he was feeling. He did not meet Bokuto’s eyes.
Ahead there came a sudden, angry exclamation. The lead man must have come upon Tracy’s mutilated body. “Imagine how they’d feel if they ever found out the truth about that,” Philip told Gordon softly. “Or if they ever discovered the real reason why most of your scouts are girls.”
Gordon shrugged. It had been a woman’s idea, but he had agreed to it. The guilt was his alone. So much guilt, in a cause he knew was hopeless.
And yet he could not let even the cynical Bokuto sense the full extent of the truth. For his sake Gordon maintained a front.
“You know the main reason,” he told his aide. “Underneath Dena’s theories and the promise of Cyclops, beneath it all you know what it’s for.”
Bokuto nodded, and for a brief moment there was something else in his voice. “For the Restored United States,” he said softly, almost reverently.
Lies within lies, Gordon thought. If you ever found out the truth, my friend . . ,
“For the Restored United States,” he agreed aloud. “Yeah.”
Together they moved ahead to watch over their army of frightened, but now angry men.
2
“It’s no good, Cyclops.”
Beyond the thick pane of glass, a pearly, opalescent eye stared back at him from a tall cylinder swaddled in cool fog. A double row of tiny, flickering lights rippled a complex pattern over and over again. This was Gordon’s ghost… the specter that had haunted him for months now … the only lie he had ever met to match his own damnable fraud.
It felt proper to do his thinking here in this darkened room. Out in the snows, on village stockades, in the lonely, dim forests, men and women were dying for the two of them — for what he, Gordon, supposedly represented, and for the machine on the other side of the glass.
For Cyclops and for the Restored United States.
Without those twin pillars of hope, the Willametters might well have collapsed by now. Corvallis would lie in ruins, its hoarded libraries, its fragile industry, its windmills and flickering electric lights, all vanished forever into the lowering dark age. The invaders from the Rogue River would have established fiefdoms up and down the valley› as they had done already in the area west of Eugene.