The farmers and aged techs were battling an enemy ten times more experienced and capable. But they fought anyway — not so much for themselves as for two symbols — for a gentle, wise machine that had really died many years ago, and for a long-vanished nation that existed now only in their imaginations.
The poor fools.
“It isn’t working,” Gordon told his peer, his fellow hoax. The row of lights replied by dancing the same complex pattern that burned in his dreams.
“This heavy winter has stopped the Holnists, for now. They’re kicking back in the towns they captured last autumn. But come springtime they’ll be back again, picking away at us, burning and killing until, one by one, the villages sue for ‘protection.’
“We try to fight. But each of those devils is a match for a dozen of our poor townsmen and farmers.”
Gordon slumped in a soft chair across from the thick sheet of glass. Even here, in the House of Cyclops, the smell of dust and age was heavy.
If we had time to train, to prepare… if only things had not been so peaceful here for so long.
If only we had a real leader.
Someone like George Powhatan.
Through the closed doors he could hear faint music. Somewhere in the building there lifted the light, moving strains of Pachelbel’s Canon — a twenty-year-old recording playing on a stereo.
He remembered weeping when he had first heard such music again. He had been so eager to think something brave and noble still existed in the world, so willing to believe he had found it here in Corvallis. But “Cyclops” turned out to be a hoax, much like his own myth of a “Restored United States.”
It still puzzled him that both fables thrived more than ever in the shadow of the survivalist invasion. They had grown amid the blood and terror into a something for which people were daily giving their lives.
“It’s just not working,” he told the ruined machine again, not expecting an answer. “Our people fight. They die. But the camouflaged bastards will be here by summer, no matter what we do.”
He listened to the sweet, sad music and wondered if, after Corvallis fell, anyone anywhere would listen to Pa-chelbel, ever again.
There was a faint tapping on the double door behind him. Gordon sat up. Other than himself, only the Servants of Cyclops were allowed in this building at night. “Yes,” he said.
A narrow trapezoid of light spilled in. The shadow of a tall, long-haired woman stretched across the carpeted floor.
Dena. If there was anyone he did not want to see right now …
Her voice was low, quick. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Gordon, but I thought you’d want to know at once. Johnny Stevens just rode in.”
Gordon stood up, his pulse rising. “My God, he got through!”
Dena nodded. “There was some trouble, but Johnny did get to Roseburg and back.”
“Men! Did he bring—” he stopped, seeing her shake her head. Hope crashed in the look in her eyes.
“Ten,” she said. “Gordon, he carried your message to the southerners, and they sent ten men.”
Strangely, her voice seemed to carry less dread than shame, as if everyone had let him down, somehow. Then something happened that he had never witnessed before. Her voice broke.
“Oh, Gordon. They aren’t even men! They’re boys, only boys!”
3
Dena had been taken in as a toddler by Joseph Lazarensky and the other surviving Corvallis techs, soon after the Doomwar, and was raised among the Servants of Cyclops. Because of this she had grown tall for a woman of these times, and was far better educated. It was one reason he had been first attracted to her.
Lately, though, Gordon found himself wishing she had read fewer books … or an awful lot more. She had developed a theory. Worse — she was almost fanatical about it, spreading it among her own coterie of impressionable young women and beyond.
Gordon was afraid that, inadvertently, he had played a role in this process. He was still unsure just why he had let Dena talk him into letting some of her girls join the Army as Scouts.
Young Tracy Smith’s body, sprawled upon the windblown drifts… tracks leading off into the blinding snow…
Wrapped in winter coats, he and Dena walked past the men guarding the entrance of the House of Cyclops, and stepped outside into the bitterly clear night. Dena said, softly, “If Johnny really has failed, it means we have only one chance left, Gordon.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He shook his head. “Not now.” It was cold and he was in a hurry to get to the Refectory to hear the Stevens lad’s report.
Dena grabbed his arm tightly and held on until he looked at her. “Gordon, you’ve got to believe that nobody’s more disappointed about this than I am. Do you think my girls and I wanted Johnny to fail? Do you think we’re that crazy?”
Gordon refrained from answering on first impulse. Earlier in the day he had passed a cluster of those recruits of Dena’s — young women from villages all over the northern Willamette Valley, girls with passionate voices and the fervid eyes of converts. They had been a strange sight, dressed in the buckskin of Army Scouts with knives sheathed at hip, wrist, and ankle, sitting in a circle with books open on their laps.
Susanna: No, no, Maria. You’ve got it mixed up. Lysistrata isn’t anything at all like the story of the Danaids! They were both wrong, but for different reasons.
Maria: I don’t get it. Because one group used sex and the other used swords?
Grace: No, that’s not it. It’s because both groups lacked a vision, an ideology …
The argument had halted abruptly when the women caught sight of Gordon. They scrambled to their feet, saluted, and watched him as he hurried uncomfortably by. All of them had that strange shining expression in their eyes… something that made him feel they were observing him as a prime specimen, a symbol, but of what he could not tell.
Tracy had had that look. Whatever it meant, he didn’t want any part of it. Gordon felt badly enough about men dying for his lies. But these women …
“No.” He shook his head as he answered Dena. “No, I don’t think you’re that crazy.”
She laughed, and squeezed his arm. “Good. I’ll settle for that much, for now.”
He knew, though, that that would not be the end of it.
Inside the Refectory, another guard took their coats. Dena at least had the wisdom to hang back then, as Gordon went on alone to hear the bad news.
Youth was a wonderful thing. Gordon remembered when he had been a teenager, just before the Doomwar. Back then, nothing short of a car wreck could have slowed him down.
Worse things had happened to some of the boys who had left southern Oregon with Johnny Stevens, nearly two weeks ago. Johnny himself must have been through hell.
He still looked seventeen though, sitting near the fire nursing a steaming mug of broth. The young man needed a hot bath and maybe forty hours’ sleep. His long, sandy hair and sparse beard covered innumerable small scratches, and only one part of his uniform was untattered — a neatly repaired emblem that bore the simple legend
Postal Service
of the Restored
United States
“Gordon!” He grinned broadly and stood up.
“I prayed you would return safely,” Gordon said, embracing Johnny. He pushed aside the sheaf of dispatches the youth drew from his oil-skin pouch … for which Johnny doubtless would have given his life.