The Postman

by David Brin

“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 the 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.

  “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:

  WHO WE ARE:

  A PORTRAIT OF AMERICA IN THE 1990S

  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.

  “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 r
eason than to get her to stop talking at last.

  5

  “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.