A hush fell over the crowd. Gordon and Powhatan watched each other across the room as Johnny stood — proud in his uniform — in front of the flickering fire. He riffled through envelopes and began reading names aloud in order to deliver the mail.
All through the still-civilized parts of the Willamette, the call had gone out. Anyone who had ever known anybody in the south had been asked to write to them. Most of the intended recipients would turn out to be long dead, of course. But a few letters would certainly arrive in the right hands, or those of relatives. Old connections might be resumed, the theory went. The plea for help would have to become something less abstract, more personal.
It had been a good idea, but once again the reaction was not as expected. The pile of undeliverable letters grew. And as Johnny called out name after name without reply, Gordon saw that a different lesson was being brought home.
The people of the Camas were being reminded of how many had died. Of how few had survived the bitter times.
And now that peace seemed to be theirs at last, it was easy to see how they resented being asked to sacrifice again, for near strangers who had had it easier for years. Those few who did acknowledge letters seemed to take them reluctantly, folding them away without reading them.
George Powhatan looked surprised when his own name was called. But his flicker of puzzlement vanished quickly as he shrugged and took a package and a slim envelope.
Things were not going well at all, Gordon realized. Johnny finished his task and gave his leader a look that seemed to say, What now?
Gordon had only one card left — the one he hated most of all — and the one he knew best how to use.
Damn. But there’s no other choice.
He stepped in front of the fireplace, facing the silent people with the warmth to his back, and took a deep breath. Then he started right in… lying to them.
“I have come to tell you a story,” he said. “I want to tell you about a country of once upon a time. It may sound familiar, since many of you were born there. But the story ought to amaze you, nevertheless. I know it always amazes me.
“It’s a strange tale, of a nation of a quarter of a billion people who once filled the sky and even the spaces between the planets with their voices, just as you good folk filled this fine hall with your songs tonight.
“They were a strong people, the strongest the world had ever known. But that hardly seemed to matter to them. When they had a chance to conquer the entire world, they simply ignored the opportunity, as if there were far more interesting things to do than that.
“They were wonderfully crazy. They laughed and they built things and they argued… They loved to accuse themselves of terrible crimes as a people: a strange practice until you understood that its hidden purpose was to make themselves better — better to each other — better to the Earth — better than prior generations of Man,
“You all know that to look up at the moon at night, or at Mars, is to see the footprints where a few of those people walked. Some of you remember sitting in your homes and watching those footprints being made.”
For the first time that evening, Gordon felt he had their full attention. He saw eyes flicker to the emblems on his uniform, and to the bright brass rider on the peak of his postman’s cap.
“The people of that nation were crazy all right,” he told them. “But they were crazy in a manner that was magnificent… in a way that had never been seen before.”
One man’s scarred face stood out from the crowd. Gordon recognized old, never-healed knife wounds. He looked at that man as he spoke.
“Today we live by killing,” he said. “But in that fabled land, for the most part, people settled their differences peaceably.”
He turned to the tired women, slumped on benches from butchering and cleaning and laying out food for so many people. Their lined faces were flickering crags in the firelight. Several showed telltale scars from the Pox, or the Big Mumps, wartime diseases or merely old plagues that had returned in new force with the end of sanitation.
“They took for granted a clean, healthy life,” he said, reminding them. “A life far gentler, far sweeter than any that had gone before.
“Or, perhaps,” he added softly, “sweeter than any that would ever come again.”
The people were looking at him now, rather than at Powhatan. And it wasn’t just in older faces that eyes glistened wetly. A boy hardly over fifteen sobbed out loud.
Gordon spread his arms. “What were those people like, those Americans? You remember how they criticized themselves, often rightly. They were arrogant, argumentative, often shortsighted …
“But they did not deserve what happened to them!
“They had begun to wield godlike powers — to create thinking machines, to give their bodies new strengths, and to mold Life itself — but it was not pride in their accomplishments that struck them down.”
He shook his head. “I cannot believe that! It cannot be true that we were punished for dreaming, for reaching out.”
His balled fist clenched whitely. “It was not fated that men and women should always live like animals! Or that they should have learned so much in vain—”
In complete surprise, Gordon felt his voice break, mid-sentence. It failed him just as it was time to begin telling the lie… to give Powhatan a story of his own.
But his heart pounded and his mouth was suddenly nearly too dry to speak. He blinked. What was happening? Tell them, he thought. Tell them now!
“In the east…” Gordon began, aware of Bokuto and Stevens staring at him.
“In the east, across the mountains and deserts, rising from that great nation’s ashes…”
He stopped again, breathing hard. It felt as if a hand were clutching his heart, threatening to squeeze if he continued. Something was preventing him from launching into his well-practiced pitch, his fairy tale.
All around they waited for him. He had them in his palm. They were ripe!
That was when Gordon glanced at George Powhatan’s visage, craggy and impervious as a cliff face in the flickering firelight. And he knew then, in a sudden insight, what the problem was.
For the first time he was trying to pass his myth of a “Restored United States” before a man who was clearly much, much stronger than he.
Gordon knew that it wasn’t only a story’s believability that mattered, but the personality behind it as well. He might convince them all of the existence of a resurgent nation, somewhere over the eastern mountains, and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference in the end… not if George Powhatan could make it all moot with a smile, an indulgent nod, a yawn.
It would become a thing of bygone days. An anachronism. Irrelevant.
Gordon closed his half-open mouth. Rows of faces looked up at him expectantly. But he shook his head, abandoning the fable, and with it, the lost fight.
“The east is far away,” he said softly.
Then he lifted his head and some strength returned to his voice. “What is going on back there may affect us all, if we live long enough. But in the meantime there is the problem of Oregon — Oregon, standing by herself, as if she alone were America still.
“The nation I spoke of smolders under the ashes, ready, if you help, to cast its light again. To lead a silent world back to hope. Believe it, and the future will be decided here, tonight. For if America ever stood for anything, it was people being at their best when times were worst — and helping one another when it counted most.”
Gordon turned and looked straight at George Powha-tan. His voice dropped low, but it no longer felt weak.
“And if you have forgotten that, if none of what I have said to you matters, then all I can say is that I pity you.”