The Postman (24 page)

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.

“There are those who say technology was the very thing that wrecked civilization,” he suggested. He sat on the chair next to the bed and closed his eyes, hoping she might take a hint and leave in a little while. He spoke without moving. “Those people may have a point. The bombs and bugs, the Three-Year Winter, the ruined networks of an interdependent society …”

This time she did not interrupt. It was his own voice that caught of its own accord. He could not recite the litany aloud.

 … hospitals … universities … restaurants … sleek airplanes that carried free citizens anywhere they might want to go …

 … laughing, clear-eyed children, dancing in the spray of lawn sprinklers … pictures sent back from the moons of Jupiter and Neptune … dreams of the stars … and wonderful, wise machines who wove delicious puns and made us proud …

 … knowledge …

“Anti-tech bullshit,” Dena said, dismissing his suggestion in two words. “It was
people
, not science, that wrecked
the world. You know that, Gordon. It was certain types of people.”

Gordon lacked the will even to shrug. What did it matter now, anyway?

When she spoke again her voice was softer. “Come here. We’ll get you out of those sweaty clothes.”

Gordon started to protest. Tonight he only wanted to curl up and close out the world, to postpone tomorrow’s decisions in a drowning of unconsciousness. But Dena was strong and adamant. Her fingers worked his buttons and pulled him over to sag back against the pillows.

They carried her scent.

“I know why it all fell apart,” Dena declared as she worked. “The book was right! Women simply didn’t pay close enough attention. Feminism got sidetracked onto issues that were at best peripheral, and ignored the real problem,
men
.

“You fellows were doing your job well enough—shaping and making and building things. Males can be brilliant that way. But anyone with any sense can see that a quarter to half of you are also lunatics, rapists, and murderers. It was
our
job to keep an eye on you, to cultivate the best and cull the bastards.”

She nodded, completely satisfied with her logic. “We women are the ones who failed, who let it happen.”

Gordon muttered. “Dena, you are certifiably crazy, do you know that?” He already realized what she was driving at. This was just another attempt to twist him around to agreeing to another mad scheme to win the war. But this time it wasn’t going to work.

At the front of his mind he wished the would-be Amazon would simply go away and leave him alone. But her scent was inside his head. And even with his eyes closed he knew it when her homespun shirt fell soundlessly to the floor and she blew out the candle.

“Maybe I am crazy,” she said. “But I do know what I’m talking about.” The covers lifted and she slid alongside him. “I
know
it. It was our fault.”

The smooth stroke of her skin was like electricity along his flank. Gordon’s body seemed to rise even while, behind his eyelids, he tried to cling to his pride and the escape of sleep.

“But we women aren’t going to let it happen again,” Dena whispered. She nuzzled his neck and ran her fingertips along his shoulder and biceps. “We’ve learned about men—about the heroes and the bastards and how to tell the difference.

“And we’re learning about ourselves, too.”

Her skin was hot. Gordon’s arms wound around her and he pulled her down beside him.

“This time,” Dena sighed, “we’re going to make a difference.”

Gordon firmly covered her mouth with his, if for no other reason than to get her to stop talking at last.

“As young Mark here will demonstrate, even a child can use our new infrared night vision scope—combined with a laser spotter beam—to pick out a target in almost pitch darkness.”

The Willamette Valley Defense Council sat behind a long table, on the stage of the largest lecture hall on the old Oregon State University campus, watching as Peter Aage displayed the latest “secret weapon” to come out of the laboratories of the Servants of Cyclops.

Gordon could barely make out the lanky technician when the lights were turned off and the doors closed. But Aage’s voice was stentoriously clear. “Up at the back of the hall we have placed a mouse in a cage, to represent an enemy infiltrator. Mark now switches on the sniper scope.” There came a soft click in the darkness. “Now he scans for the heat radiation given off by the mouse.…”

“I see it!” The child’s voice piped.

“Good boy. Now Mark swings the laser over to bear on the animal …”

“Got him!”

“… and once the beam is locked into place, our spotter changes laser frequencies so that a visible spot shows the rest of us—the mouse!”

Gordon peered at the dark area up at the back of the hall. Nothing had happened. There was still only a deep darkness.

Someone in the audience giggled.

“Maybe it got ate!” a voice cracked.

“Yeah. Hey, maybe you techs oughta tune that thing to look for a cat, instead!” Someone gave a rumbling “meow.”

Although the Council Chairman was banging his gavel, Gordon joined the wise guys down below in laughing out loud. He was tempted to interject a remark of his own, but everyone knew his voice. His role here was a somber one, and he would probably only hurt somebody’s feelings.

A bustle of activity over to the left told of a gathering of techs, whispering urgently together. Finally, someone called for the lights. The fluorescents flickered on and the members of the Defense Council blinked as their eyes readapted.

Mark Aage, the ten-year-old boy Gordon had rescued from survivalists in the ruins of Eugene some months ago, removed his night vision helmet and looked up. “I could see the mouse,” he insisted. “Real good. And I hit him with th’ laser beam. But it wouldn’t switch colors!”

Peter Aage looked embarrassed. The blond man wore the same black-trimmed white as the techs still huddled over the balky device. “It worked through fifty trials yesterday,” he explained. “Maybe the parametric converter got stuck. It does some times.

“Of course this is only a prototype, and nobody here in Oregon has tried to build anything like this in nearly twenty years. But we ought to have the bugs out of it before we go into production.”

Three different groups made up the Defense Council. The two men and a woman who were dressed like Peter, in Servants’ robes, nodded sympathetically. The rest of the councillors seemed less understanding.

Two men to Gordon’s right wore blue tunics and leather jackets similar to his own. On their sleeves were sewn patches depicting an eagle rising defiantly from a pyre, rimmed by the legend:

Gordon’s fellow “postmen” looked at each other, one rolling his eyes in disgust.

In the middle sat two women and three men, including the Council Chairman, representing the various regions in the alliance: counties once tied together by their reverence of Cyclops, more recently by a growing postal network, and now by their fear of a common foe. Their clothing was varied, but each wore an armband bearing a shiny emblem—a W and a V superimposed to stand for Willamette Valley. The chromed symbols were one item plentiful enough to be supplied the entire Army, salvaged from long-abandoned motorcars.

It was one of these civilian representatives who spoke first. “Just how many of these gadgets do you think you techs can put together by springtime?”

Peter thought. “Well, if we go all out, I guess we ought to have a dozen or so fixed up by the end of March.”

“And they’ll all need ’lectricity, I suppose.”

“We’ll provide hand generators, of course. The entire kit ought to weigh no more than fifty pounds, all told.”

The farmers looked at each other. The woman representing the Cascade Indian communities seemed to speak for all of them.

“I’m sure these night scopes might do some good defending a few important sites against sneak attacks. But I want to know how they’ll help after the snow melts, when those Holnist dick cutters come down raiding and burning all our little hamlets and villages one by one. We can’t pull the whole population into Corvallis, you know. We’d starve in weeks.”

“Yeah,” another farmer added. “Where are all those super weapons you big domes were supposed to be comin’ up with? Have you guys switched Cyclops
off
, or what?”

It was the Servants’ turn to look at each other. Their leader, Dr. Taigher, started to protest.

“That’s not fair! We’ve hardly had any
time
. Cyclops was built for peaceful uses and has to reprogram himself to deal with things like war. Anyway, he can come up with great plans, but it’s fallible men who have to implement them!”

To Gordon it was a marvel. Here, in public, the man
actually seemed hurt, defensive of his mechanical oracle … which the people of the valley still revered like great Oz. The representative of the northern townships shook his head, respectful but obstinate.

“Now, I’d be the last one to criticize Cyclops. I’m sure he’s crankin’ out the ideas as fast as he can. But I just can’t see where this night scope is any better than that balloon thing you keep talking about, or those gas bombs or those gimmicky little mines. There just aren’t enough of ’em to do any damn good!

“And even if you made hundreds, thousands, they’d be great if we were fightin’ a real army, like in Vietnam or Kenya before the Doomtime. But they’re nearly useless against th’ damsurvivalists!”

Although he kept silent, Gordon couldn’t help agreeing. Dr. Taigher looked down at his hands. After sixteen years of peaceful, benign hoaxing—doling out a small stream of recycled Twentieth-Century wonders to keep the area farmers entranced—he and his technicians were being called on to deliver
real
miracles, at last. Fixing toys and wind-driven electric generators to impress the locals just wouldn’t suffice anymore.

The man sitting to Gordon’s right stirred. It was Eric Stevens, young Johnny Stevens’s grandfather. The old man wore the same uniform as Gordon, and represented the Upper Willamette region, those few towns just south of Eugene that had joined the alliance.

“So we’re back to square one,” Stevens said. “Cyclops’s gimmicks can help here and there. Mostly they’ll make a few strong points a bit stronger. But I think we’re all in agreement that that won’t do much more than inconvenience the enemy.

“Likewise Gordon tells us that we can’t expect help from the civilized East anywhere near in time. It’s a decade or more before the Restored U.S. will arrive out here in any force. We have to hold out at least that long, maybe, before real contact is established.”

The old man looked at the others fiercely. “There’s
only one way to do that, and that’s to fight!” He pounded the table. “It all comes down to basics, once again.
Men
are what’ll make the difference.”

There was a mutter of agreement down the table. But Gordon was acutely aware of Dena, sitting in the seats below, waiting her chance to address the Council. She was shaking her head, and Gordon felt as if he could read her mind.

Not just men
 … she was thinking. The tall young woman wore the robes of a Servant, but Gordon knew where her real loyalties lay. She sat with three of her disciples—buckskin-clad female scouts in the Army of the Willamette—all members of her eccentric cabal.

Until now the Council would have rejected their scheme out of hand. The girls had barely been allowed to join the Army at all, and then only out of a latent sense of last-century feminism that lingered in this still-civilized valley.

But Gordon sensed a growing desperation at the table today. The news Johnny Stevens had brought home from the south had struck hard. Soon, when the snows stopped falling and the warm rains began again, the councillors would begin grasping at any plan. Any idiocy at all.

Gordon decided to enter this discussion before things got out of hand. The Chairman quickly deferred when Gordon lifted his hand.

“I’m sure the Council wishes to convey to Cyclops—and to his technicians—our gratitude for their unceasing efforts.” There was a mutter of agreement. Neither Taigher nor Peter Aage met his eyes.

“We have perhaps another six or eight weeks of bad weather on our side before we can look for a resumption of major activity by the enemy. After hearing the reports of the training and ordnance committees, it’s clear we have our work cut out for us.”

Indeed, Philip Bokuto’s summary had begun the morning’s litany of bad news. Gordon took a breath. “When the Holnist invasion began last summer, I told you all not to
expect any help from the rest of the nation. Establishing a postal network, as I have been doing with your help, is only the first step in a long process until the continent can be reunited. For years to come, Oregon will stand essentially alone.”

He managed to lie by implication while speaking words that were the literal truth, a skill he had grown good at, if not proud of.

“I won’t mince words with you. The failure of the people of the Roseburg region to send more than a dribble of aid has been the worst blow of all. The southern folk have the experience, the skill, and most of all, the leadership we need. In my opinion, persuading them to help us
must
take priority over everything else.”