by David Brin
And the starvation might not have been so awful had terrified communities not blocked rails and roads to keep out the germs.
As for the long-dreaded atom, only a tiny fraction of the world’s nuclear arsenals were used before the Slavic Resurgence collapsed from within and unexpected victory was declared. Those few score bombs were enough to trigger the Three-Year Winter, but not a Century-Long Night that might have sent Man the way of the dinosaurs. For weeks it appeared that a great miracle of restraint had saved the planet.
So it seemed. And indeed, even the combination—a few bombs, some bugs, and three poor harvests—would not have been enough to ruin a great nation, and with it a world.
But there was another illness, a cancer from within.
Damn you forever, Nathan Holn, Gordon thought. Across a dark continent it was a common litany.
He pushed aside the mail sacks. Ignoring the morning chill, he opened his left belt pouch and pulled out a small package wrapped in aluminum foil, coated with melted wax.
If there ever had been an emergency, this was one. Gordon would need energy to get through the day. A dozen cubes of beef bouillon were all he had, but they would have to do.
Washing down a bitter, salty chunk with a swig from his canteen, Gordon kicked open the left door of the jeep, letting several sacks tumble out onto the frosted ground. He turned to his right and looked at the muffled skeleton that had quietly shared the night with him.
“Mr. Postman, I’m going to give you as close to a decent burial as I can manage with my bare hands. I know that’s not much payment for what you’ve given me. But it’s all I can offer.” He reached over the narrow, bony shoulder and unlocked the driver’s door.
His moccasins slipped on the icy ground as he got out and stepped carefully around to the other side of the jeep.
At least it didn’t snow last night It’s so dry up here that the ground ought to thaw enough for digging in a little while.
The rusty right-hand door groaned as he pulled. It was tricky, catching the skeleton in an emptied mail sack as it pitched forward. Gordon somehow managed to get the bundle of clothes and bones laid out on the forest floor.
He was amazed at the state of preservation. The dry climate had almost mummified the postman’s remains, giving insects time to clean up without much mess. The rest of the jeep appeared to have been free from mold for all these years.
First he checked the mailman’s apparel.
Funny—Why was he wearing a paisley shirt under his jacket?
The garment, once colorful but now faded and stained, was a total loss, but the leather jacket was a wonderful find. If big enough, it would improve his chances immeasurably.
The footgear looked old and cracked, but perhaps serviceable. Carefully, Gordon shook out the gruesome, dry remnants and laid the shoes against his feet.
Maybe a bit large. But then, anything would be better than ripped camp moccasins.
Gordon slid the bones out onto the mail sack with as little violence as he could manage, surprised at how easy it was. Any superstition had been burned out the night before. All that remained was a mild reverence and an ironic gratitude to the former owner of these things. He shook the clothes, holding his breath against the dust, and hung them on a ponderosa branch to air out. He returned to the jeep.
Aha, he thought then. The mystery of the shirt is solved. Right next to where he had slept was a long-sleeved blue uniform blouse with Postal Service patches on the shoulders. It looked almost new, in spite of the years. One for comfort, and another for the boss.
Gordon had known postmen to do that, when he was a boy. One fellow, during the muggy afternoons of summer, had worn bright Hawaiian shirts as he delivered the mail. The postman had always been grateful for a cool glass of lemonade. Gordon wished he could remember his name.
Shivering in the morning chill, he slipped into the uniform shirt. It was only a little bit large.
“Maybe I’ll grow to fill it out,” he mumbled, joking weakly with himself. At thirty-four he probably weighed less than he had at seventeen.
The glove compartment contained a brittle map of Oregon to replace the one he had lost. Then, with a shout Gordon grabbed a small square of clear plastic. A scintillator! Far better than his Geiger counter, the little crystal would give off tiny flashes whenever its crystalline interior was struck by gamma radiation. It didn’t even need power! Gordon cupped it in front of his eye and watched a few sparse flickerings, caused by cosmic rays. Otherwise, the cube was quiescent.
Now what was a prewar mailman doing with a gadget like that? Gordon wondered idly, as the device went into his pants pocket.
The glove compartment flashlight was a loss, of course; the emergency flares were crumbled paste.
The bag, of course. On the floor below the driver’s seat was a large, leather letter carrier’s sack. It was dry and cracked, but the straps held when he tugged, and the flaps would keep out water.
It wouldn’t come close to replacing his lost Kelty, but the bag would be a vast improvement over nothing at all. He opened the main compartment and bundles of aged correspondence spilled out, breaking into scattered piles as brittle rubber bands snapped apart. Gordon picked up a few of the nearest pieces.
“From the Mayor of Bend, Oregon, to the Chairman of the School of Medicine, University of Oregon, Eugene.” Gordon intoned the address as though he were playing Polonius. He flipped through more letters. The addresses sounded pompous and archaic.
“Dr. Franklin Davis, of the small town of Gilchrist sends—with the word URGENT printed clearly on the envelope—a rather bulky letter to the Director of Regional Disbursement of Medical Supplies … no doubt pleading priority for his requisitions.”
Gordon’s sardonic smile faded into a frown as he turned over one letter after another. Something was wrong, here.
He had expected to be amused by junk mail and personal correspondence. But there didn’t seem to be a single advertisement in the bag. And while there were many private letters, most of the envelopes appeared to be on one or another type of official stationery.
Well, there wasn’t time for voyeurism anyway. He’d take a dozen or so letters for entertainment, and use the backsides for his new journal.
He avoided thinking about the loss of the old volume—sixteen years’ tiny scratchings, now doubtless being perused by that onetime stockbroker robber. It would be read and preserved, he was sure, along with the tiny volumes of verse he had carried in his pack, or he had misread Roger Septien’s personality.
Someday, he would come and get them back.
What was a U.S. Postal Service jeep doing out here, anyway? And what had killed the postman? He found part of his answer around at the back of the vehicle—bullet holes in the tailgate window, well grouped midway up the right side.
Gordon looked over to the ponderosa. Yes, the shirt and the jacket each had two holes in the back of the upper chest area.
The attempted hijacking or robbery could not have been prewar. Mail carriers were almost never attacked, even in the late eighties’ depression riots, before the “golden age” of the nineties.
Besides, a missing carrier would have been searched for until found.
So, the attack took place after the One-Week War. But what was a mailman doing driving alone through the countryside after the United States had effectively ceased to exist? How long afterward had this happened?
The fellow must have driven off from his ambush, seeking obscure roads and trails to get away from his assailants. Maybe he didn’t know the severity of his wounds, or simply panicked.
But Gordon suspected that there was another reason the letter carrier had chosen to weave in and out of blackberry thickets to hide deep in forest depths.
“He was protecting his cargo,” Gordon whispered. “He measured the chance he’d black out on the road against the possibility of getting to help … and decided to cache the mail, rather than try to live.”
So, this was a bona fide postw
ar postman. A hero of the flickering twilight of civilization. Gordon thought of the old-time ode of the mails … “Neither sleet, nor hail …” and wondered at the fact that some had tried this hard to keep the light alive.
That explained the official letters and the lack of junk mail. He hadn’t realized that even a semblance of normality had remained for so long. Of course, a seventeen-year-old militia recruit was unlikely to have seen anything normal. Mob rule and general looting in the main disbursement centers had kept armed authority busy and attrited until the militia finally vanished into the disturbances it had been sent to quell. If men and women elsewhere were behaving more like human beings during those months of horror, Gordon never witnessed it.
The brave story of the postman only served to depress Gordon. This tale of struggle against chaos, by mayors and university professors and postmen, had a “what if” flavor that was too poignant for him to consider for long.
The tailgate opened reluctantly, after some prying. Moving mail sacks aside, he found the letter carrier’s hat, with its tarnished badge, an empty lunchbox, and a valuable pair of sunglasses lying in thick dust atop a wheel well.
A small shovel, intended to help free the jeep from road ruts, would now help to bury the driver.
Finally, just behind the driver’s seat, broken under several heavy sacks, Gordon found a smashed guitar. A large-caliber bullet had snapped its neck. Near it, a large, yellowed plastic bag held a pound of desiccated herbs that gave off a strong, musky odor. Gordon’s recollection hadn’t faded enough to forget the aroma of marijuana.
He had envisioned the postman as a middle-aged, balding, conservative type. Gordon now recreated the image, and made the fellow look more like himself, wiry, bearded, with a perpetual, stunned expression that seemed about to say, “Oh, wow.”
A neohippy perhaps—a member of a subgeneration that had hardly begun to flower before the war snuffed it out and everything else optimistic—a neohippy dying to protect the establishment’s mail. It didn’t surprise Gordon in the slightest. He had had friends in the movement, sincere people, if maybe a little strange.
Gordon retrieved the guitar strings and for the first time that morning felt a little guilty.
The letter carrier hadn’t even been armed! Gordon remembered reading once that the U.S. Mail operated across the lines for three years into the 1860s Civil War. Perhaps this fellow had trusted his countrymen to respect that tradition.
Post-Chaos America had no tradition but survival. In his travels, Gordon had found that some isolated communities welcomed him in the same way minstrels had been kindly received far and wide in medieval days. In others, wild varieties of paranoia reigned. Even in those rare cases where he had found friendliness, where decent people seemed willing to welcome a stranger, Gordon had always, before long, moved on. Always, he found himself beginning to dream again of wheels turning and things flying in the sky.
It was already midmorning. His gleanings here were enough to make the chances of survival better without a confrontation with the bandits. The sooner he was over the pass then, and into a decent watershed, the better off he would be.
Right now, nothing would serve him half so well as a stream, somewhere out of the range of the bandit gang, where he could fish for trout to fill his belly.
One more task, here. He hefted the shovel.
Hungry or not, you owe the guy this much.
He looked around for a shady spot with soft earth to dig in, and a view.
4
“… They said, ‘Fear not, Macbeth, till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’; and now a wood comes to Dunsinane!
“Arm, arm, arm yourselves! If this is what the witch spoke of—that thing out there—there’ll be no running, or hiding here!”
Gordon clutched his wooden sword, contrived from planking and a bit of tin. He motioned to an invisible aide-de-camp.
“I’m gettin’ weary of the sun, and wish the world were undone.
“Ring the alarum bell! Blow, wind! Come wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back!”
Gordon squared his shoulders, flourished his sword, and marched Macbeth offstage to his doom.
Out of the light of the tallow lamps, he swiveled to catch a glimpse of his audience. They had loved his earlier acts. But this bastardized, one-man version of Macbeth might have gone over their heads.
An instant after he exited, though, enthusiastic applause began, led by Mrs. Adele Thompson, the leader of this small community. Adults whistled and stamped their feet. Younger citizens clapped awkwardly, those below twenty years of age watching their elders and slapping their hands awkwardly, as if they were taking part in this strange rite for the first time.
Obviously, they had liked his abbreviated version of the ancient tragedy. Gordon was relieved. To be honest, some parts had been simplified less for brevity than because of his imperfect memory of the original. He had last seen a copy of the play almost a decade ago, and that a half-burned fragment.
Still, the final lines of his soliloquy had been canon. That part about “wind and wrack” he would never forget.
Grinning, Gordon returned to take his bows onstage—a plank-covered garage lift in what had once been the only gas station in the tiny hamlet of Pine View.
Hunger and isolation had driven him to try the hospitality of this mountain village of fenced fields and stout log walls, and the gamble had paid off better than he’d hoped. An exchange of a series of shows for his meals and supplies had tentatively passed by a fair majority of the voting adults, and now the deal seemed settled.
“Bravo! Excellent!” Mrs. Thompson stood in the front row, clapping eagerly. White-haired and bony, but still robust, she turned to encourage the forty-odd others, including small children, to show their appreciation. Gordon did a flourish with one hand, and bowed deeper than before.
Of course his peformance had been pure crap. But he was probably the only person within a hundred miles who had once minored in drama. There were “peasants” once again in America, and like his predecessors in the minstrel trade, Gordon had learned to go for the unsubtle in his shows.
Timing his final bow for the moment before the applause began to fade, Gordon hopped off the stage and began removing his slap-dash costume. He had set firm limits; there would be no encore. His stock was theater, and he meant to keep them hungry for it until it was time to leave.
“Marvelous. Just wonderful!” Mrs. Thompson told him as he joined the villagers, now gathering at a buffet table along the back wall. The older children formed a circle around him, staring in wonderment.
Pine View was quite prosperous, compared with so many of the starvling villages of the plains and mountains. In some places a good part of a generation was nearly missing due to the devastating effects the Three-Year Winter had had on children. But here he saw several teenagers and young adults, and even a few oldsters who must have been past middle age when the Doom fell.
They must have fought to save everybody. That pattern had been rarer, but he had seen it, too, here and there.
Everywhere there were traces of those years. Faces pocked from diseases or etched from weariness and war. Two women and a man were amputees and another looked out of one good eye, the other a cloudy mass of cataracts.
He was used to such things—at least on a superficial level. He nodded gratefully to his host.
“Thank you, Mrs. Thompson. I appreciate kind words from a perceptive critic. I’m glad you liked the show.”
“No, no seriously,” the clan leader insisted, as if Gordon had been trying to be modest. “I haven’t been so delighted in years. The Macbeth part at the end there sent shivers up my spine! I only wish I’d watched it on TV back when I had a chance. I didn’t know it was so good!
“And that inspiring speech you gave us earlier, that one of Abraham Lincoln’s … well, you know, we tried to start a school here, in the beginning. But it just didn’t work out. We needed every hand, even the kids’. Now though, well, that spee
ch got me to thinking. We’ve got some old books put away. Maybe now’s the time to give it a try again.”
Gordon nodded politely. He had seen this syndrome before—the best of the dozen or so types of reception he had experienced over the years, but also among the saddest. It always made him feel like a charlatan, when his shows brought out grand, submerged hopes in a few of the decent, older people who remembered better days … hopes that, to his knowledge, had always fallen through before a few weeks or months had passed.
It was as if the seeds of civilization needed more than goodwill and the dreams of aging high school graduates to water them. Gordon often wondered if the right symbol might do the trick—the right idea. But he knew his little dramas, however well received, weren’t the key. They might trigger a beginning, once in a great while, but local enthusiasm always failed soon after. He was no traveling messiah. The legends he offered weren’t the kind of sustenance needed in order to overcome the inertia of a dark age.
The world turns, and soon the last of the old generation will be gone. Scattered tribes will rule the continent. Perhaps in a thousand years the adventure will begin again. Meanwhile …
Gordon was spared hearing more of Mrs. Thompson’s sadly unlikely plans. The crowd squeezed out a small, silver-haired, black woman, wiry and leather skinned, who seized Gordon’s arm in a friendly, viselike grip.
“Now Adele,” she said to the clan matriarch, “Mister Krantz hasn’t had a bite since noontime. I think, if we want him able to perform tomorrow night, we’d better feed him. Right?” She squeezed his right arm and obviously thought him undernourished—an impression he was loathe to alter, with the aroma of food wafting his way.
Mrs. Thompson gave the other woman a look of patient indulgence. “Of course, Patricia,” she said. “I’ll speak with you more about this, later, Mr. Krantz, after Mrs. Howlett has fattened you up a bit.” Her smile and her glittering eyes held a touch of intelligent irony, and Gordon found himself reevaluating Adele Thompson. She certainly was nobody’s fool.