“I’ll look at those in a little while. Sit. Drink your soup.”
Gordon took a moment to glance over toward the big fireplace, where the new southern recruits were being tended by the Refectory staff. One boy’s arm was in a sling. Another, lying on a table, was having a scalp gash tended by Dr. Pilch, the Army’s physician.
The rest sipped from steaming mugs and stared at Gordon in frank curiosity. Obviously Johnny had been filling their ears with stories. They looked ready, eager to fight.
And not one of them was over sixteen.
So much for our last hope, Gordon thought.
People in the midsouthern part of Oregon had been fighting the Rogue River survivalists for nearly twenty years, and in the last ten or so had managed to beat the barbarians to a standstill. Unlike Gordon’s northerners, the ranchers and farmers down around Roseburg had not been weakened by years of peace. They were tough, and knew their enemy well.
They also had real leaders. There was one man Gordon had heard of who had driven back one Holnist raid after another in bloody disarray. No doubt that was why the enemy had come up with their new plan. In a bold stroke the Holnists had taken to sea, landing up the coast at Florence, far north of their traditional foes.
It was a brilliant move. And now there was nothing to stop them. The southern farmers had sent only ten boys to help. Ten boys.
The recruits stood up as Gordon approached. He went down the line asking each his name, his hometown. They shook his hand earnestly, and each addressed him as Mr. Inspector. No doubt they all hoped to earn the highest honor, to become postmen… officers of a nation they were too young ever to have known.
Neither that, nor the fact that the nation no longer existed, would keep them from dying for it, Gordon knew.
He noticed Phil Bokuto sitting in a corner, whittling. The black ex-Marine said nothing, but Gordon could tell he was sizing up the southerners already, and Gordon agreed. If any of them had any skill at all, they would be made scouts, whatever Dena and her women said.
Gordon sensed her watching from the back of the room. She had to know he would never agree to her new plan. Not while he was in command of the Army of the Lower Willamette.
Not while he had a breath left in his body.
He spent some minutes talking with the recruits. When he next looked back toward the door, Dena had left, perhaps to carry word to her cabal of would-be Amazons. Gordon was resigned to an inevitable confrontation.
Johnny Stevens fingered the oil-skin pouch as Gordon returned to the table. This time the young man would not be put off. He held out the packet he had carried so far.
“I’m sorry, Gordon.” He kept his voice low. “I did my best, but they just wouldn’t listen! I delivered your letters, but…” He shook his head.
Gordon leafed through replies to the entreaties for help he had written more than two months ago. “They all did want to join the postal network,” Johnny added with irony in his voice. “Even if we fall up here, I suppose there’ll still be a sliver of Oregon free and ready when the nation reaches here.”
On the yellowed envelopes Gordon recognized the names of towns all around Roseburg, some legendary even up here. He scanned some of the replies. They were courteous, curious, even enthusiastic about the stories of a reborn U.S. But there were no promises. And no troops.
“What about George Powhatan?”
Johnny shrugged. “All the other mayors and sheriffs and bosses down there look to him. They won’t do anything without he does it first.”
“I don’t see Powhatan’s reply.” He had looked at all of the letters.
Johnny shook his head. “Powhatan said he didn’t trust paper, Gordon. Anyway, his answer was only two words long. He asked me to tell it to you, direct.”
Johnny’s voice fell.
“He said to tell you — ‘I’m sorry.’”
4
Light shone under the door as Gordon returned to his room much later in the evening. His hand hesitated inches from the knob. He clearly remembered snuffing the candles earlier, before leaving to commune with Cyclops.
A soft, female scent solved the mystery before he had the door more than half open. He saw Dena on his bed, her legs under the covers. She wore a loose shirt of white homespun and held a book up close to the bedside candle.
“That’s bad for your eyes,” he said as he dropped Johnny’s dispatch pouch onto his desk.
Dena replied without looking up from her book. “I agree. May I remind you that you are the one who put your room back into the Stone Age, while the rest of this building is electrified. I suppose you prewar types still have it in your silly heads that candlelight is somehow romantic. Is that it?”
Gordon wasn’t exactly sure why he had taken down the electric bulbs in his room, and carefully packed them away. During his first few weeks in Corvallis he’d felt a lump of joy every time he had a chance to turn a switch and make electrons flow again, as they had in the days of his youth.
Now, in his own room at least, he could not bear the sweetness of such light.
Gordon poured water and then soda powder over his toothbrush. “You have a good forty-watt bulb in your own room/’ he reminded her. “You could do your reading there.”
Dena ignored the pointed remark and instead used the flat of her hand to slap the open book. “I don’t understand this!” she declared, exasperated. “According to this book, America was having a cultural renaissance, just before the Doomwar. Sure, there was Nathan Holn, preaching his mad doctrine of super machismo — and there were problems with the Slavic Mystics overseas — but for the most part it was a brilliant time! In art, music, science, everything seemed about to come together.
“And yet these surveys taken at the end of the century say that the majority of American women of that time still mistrusted technology!
“I can’t believe it! Is it true? Were they all idiots?” Gordon spat into the wash basin and looked up at the cover of the book. It bore a legend in bright holographic print:
He shook out his toothbrush. “It wasn’t that simple, Dena. Technology had been thought of as a male occupation for thousands of years. Even in the nineties, only a small fraction of the engineers and scientists were women, though there were more and more damn fine—”
“That’s irrelevant!” Dena interrupted. She shut the book and shook her light brown hair in emphasis. “What’s important is who benefits! Even if it was mostly a male art, technology helped women far more than men! Compare America of your time with the world today, and tell me I’m wrong.”
“The present is hell for women,” he agreed. Gordon picked up the pitcher and poured water over his washcloth. He felt very tired. “Life is far worse for them than it is even for men. It’s brutish, painful, and short. And to my shame I let you persuade me to put girls in the worst, most dangerous—”
Dena seemed determined not to let him finish a sentence. Or was it that she sensed his pain over young Tracy Smith’s death, and wanted to change the subject? “Fine!” she said. “Then what I want to know is why women were afraid of technology before the war — if this crazy book is right — when science had done so much for them. When the alternative was so terrible!”
Gordon rehung the damp cloth. He shook his head. It had all been so long ago. Since those days, in his travels, he had seen horrors that would leave Dena stunned speechless, if ever he managed to make himself speak of them.
She had been only an infant when civilization came crashing down. Except for the terrible days before her adoption into the House of Cyclops — no doubt by now long gone from her memory — she had grown up in perhaps the only place in the world today where a vestige of the old comforts still maintained. No wonder she had no gray hairs yet, at the ripe age of twenty-two.