The Postman (28 page)

As you read this it is already too late to stop us, so please stay calm while I try to explain. Then, if you still cannot condone what we have done, I hope you can somehow find it in your heart to forgive us.

I’ve talked it over and over with Susanna and Jo and the other Army women. We’ve read as many books as our duties allowed time for. We’ve badgered our mothers and aunts for their remembrances. Finally, we were forced to come to two conclusions.

The first one is straightforward. It’s clear that male human beings should never have been left in control of the world all these centuries. Many of you are wonderful beyond belief, but too many others will always be bloody lunatics.

Your sex is simply built that way. Its better side gave us power and light, science and reason, medicine and philosophy. Meanwhile, the dark half spent its time dreaming up unimaginable hells and putting them into practice.

Some of the old books hint at
REASONS
for this strange division, Gordon. Science might even have been on the verge of an answer before the Doomtime. There were sociologists (mostly women) studying the problem, asking hard questions.

But whatever they learned, it’s lost to us now, except for the simplest truths.

Oh, I can just
HEAR
you, Gordon, telling me I’m exaggerating again—that I’m oversimplifying and “generalizing from too little data.”

For one thing, a lot of women participated in the great “male” accomplishments, and in the great evils, as well.

Also, it’s obvious that most men fall in between those extremes of good and bad I spoke of.

But Gordon, those ones in between wield no power! They don’t change the world, for better or worse. They are irrelevant.

You see? I can address your objections as if you were here! Though I never forget that life has cheated me of so much, I certainly have had a fine education for a woman of these times. This last year I’ve learned even more, from you. Knowing you has convinced me that I am right about men.

Face it, my dearest love. There are simply not enough of you good guys left to win this round. You and those like you are our heroes, but the bastards are winning! They are about to bring on the night that comes after twilight, and you cannot stop them alone.

There
IS
another force in humanity, Gordon. It might have tipped the balance in your age-old struggle, back in the days before the Doomwar. But it was lazy or distracted … I don’t know. For some reason, though, it did not intervene. Not in any concerted way.

That is the second thing we, the women of the Army of the Willamette, have realized: that we have one last chance to make up for what women failed to do in the past.

We’re going to stop the bastards ourselves, Gordon. We are going to do our job at last … to
CHOOSE
among men, and to cull out the mad dogs.

•  •  •

“Stop! … Oh, God … Don’t!”

When Gordon came abruptly awake, he was already on his feet. The remains of the evening campfire smoldered inches from his bare toes. His arms were outstretched, as if in the midst of grabbing after something, or someone.

Swaying, he felt the edges of his dream unravel into the forest night on all sides. His ghost had visited him again, only moments ago in his sleep. The voice of the dead machine had spoken to him across the decades, accusing with growing impatience.

 … Who will take responsibility … for these foolish children …?

Rows of running lights, and a voice of sad, cryogenic wisdom, despairing of the endless failings of living human beings.

“Gordon? What’s going on?”

Johnny Stevens sat up in his bedroll, rubbing his eyes. It was very dim under the overcast sky, with only the fading embers and a few wan stars here and there, twinkling faintly through the overhanging branches.

Gordon shook his head, partly in order to hide his shivers. “I just thought I’d check on the horses and the pickets,” he said. “Go back to sleep, Johnny.”

The young postman nodded. “Okay. Tell Philip and Cal to wake me when it’s time for watch change.” The boy lay back down and pulled the bedroll over his shoulders. “Be careful, Gordon.”

Soon his breath was whistling softly again, his face smooth and careless. The hard life seemed to suit Johnny, something that never ceased to amaze Gordon. After seventeen years of it,
he
still wasn’t reconciled with having to live this way. Every so often—even as he approached middle
age—he still imagined he was going to wake up in his student dormitory room, back in Minnesota, and all the dirt and death and madness would turn out to be a nightmare, an alternate world that had never been.

Near the coals, a row of lumpy bedrolls lay close together for shared warmth. There were eight figures there besides Johnny—Aaron Schimmel plus all the fighters they had been able to recruit from the Camas Valley.

Four of the volunteers were boys, hardly old enough to shave. The others were all old men.

Gordon did not want to think, but memories crowded in as he pulled on his boots and woolen poncho.

For all of his near-total victory, George Powhatan had seemed quite eager to see Gordon and his band depart. The visitors made the patriarch of Sugarloaf Mountain uncomfortable. His domain would not be the same until they left.

It turned out that Dena had sent
two
packages—one more in addition to her crazy letter. In the other she had managed to convey gifts to the women of Powhatan’s household in spite of Gordon, by dispatching them via “U.S. Mail.” Pathetic little packets of soap and needles and underwear were accompanied by tiny mimeographed pamphlets. There were vials of pills and ointments Gordon recognized from the Corvallis central pharmacy. And he had seen copies of her letter to himself.

The whole thing had Powhatan mystified. At least as much as Gordon’s speech, Dena’s letter had made the man ill at ease.

“I don’t understand,” he had said, straddling a chair while Gordon hurriedly packed to leave. “How could an obviously intelligent young woman have come up with such a bizarre set of ideas? Hasn’t anybody cared enough to knock some sense into her? What does she and her crew of little girls think they can accomplish against
Holnists?
”

Gordon had not bothered to answer, knowing it would irritate Powhatan. Anyway, he was in a hurry. He still hoped there was time to get back and stop the Scouts before they performed the worst idiocy since the Doomwar itself.

Powhatan kept probing, though. The man sounded genuinely puzzled. And he was unaccustomed to being put off. At last, Gordon found himself actually speaking out in Dena’s defense.

“What kind of ‘common sense’ would you have had someone knock into her, George? The logic of the colorless drabs who cook meals for complacent men, here in the Camas? Or perhaps she should speak only when spoken to, like those poor women who live as cattle down in the Rogue, and now in Eugene?

“They may be wrong. They may even be crazy. But at least Dena and her comrades care about something bigger than themselves, and have the guts to fight for it. Do you, George? Do you?”

Powhatan had looked down at the floor. Gordon barely heard his reply. “Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago … for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?”

The steely gray eyes were narrow and sad when next he looked up at Gordon. “I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don’t love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They’ll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go.

“I lost my wife, my son, while away battling for
big things
. They needed me, but I had to go off trying to save the world.” Powhatan snorted at the last phrase. “Today I fight for my people, for my farm—for smaller things—things I can
hold
.”

Gordon had watched Powhatan’s large, hard-calloused hand flex, as if straining to grasp life itself. It had never occurred to him until then that this man feared anything in the world, but there it was, visible for only the briefest moment.

A certain rare kind of terror in his eyes.

At the door to Gordon’s guest room, Powhatan had turned, his chiseled face outlined in the flickering light from the tallow candles. “Me, I think I know why your crazy
woman is pulling whatever mad stunt she’s cooked up, and it doesn’t have to do with that grand ‘heroes and villains’ bullshit she wrote about.

“The other women, they’re just following her because she’s a natural leader in desperate times. She has them swept along in her wake, poor girls. But she …” Powhatan shook his head. “She
thinks
she’s doing it for the big reasons, but one of the small things lies beneath it all.

“She’s doing it out of love, Mr. Inspector. I think she’s doing it for you alone.”

They had looked at each other, that last time, and Gordon realized then that Powhatan was paying the visiting postman back with interest for the unasked-for guilt he had been delivered.

Gordon had nodded to the Squire of Sugarloaf Mountain, accepting the burden—postage prepaid.

Leaving the warmth of the coals, Gordon felt his way over to the horses and carefully checked their lines. All seemed well, though the animals were a little jumpy still. After all, they had been driven hard today. The ruins of the prewar town of Remote lay behind them, and the old Bear Creek Campgrounds. If the band really flew tomorrow, Calvin Lewis figured they might make Roseburg by a little after nightfall.

Powhatan had been generous with provisions for their journey. He had given of the best of his stables. Anything the northerners wanted, they could have. Except for George Powhatan, of course.

As Gordon patted the last nickering horse, and stepped out under the trees, a part of him was still unable to believe they had come all this way for nothing. Failure tasted bitter in his mouth.

 … rippling lights … the voice of a long-dead machine …

Gordon smiled without amusement.

“If I could have infected him with your ghost, Cyclops, don’t you think I would have? But you don’t reach a man like him as simply as that! He’s made of stronger stuff than I was.”

 … 
Who
will take responsibility …?

“I don’t know!” he whispered urgently, silently, at the darkness all around him. “I don’t even care anymore!”

He was maybe forty feet from the campsite now. It occurred to him that he could just keep on going should he choose. If he disappeared into the forest, right now, he would still be better off than sixteen months ago when, robbed and injured, he had stumbled upon that ancient, wrecked postal jeep in a high, dusty forest.

He had taken the uniform and bag only in order to survive, but something had latched onto him that strange night, the first of many ghosts.

At little Pine View the unsought legend began—this Johnny Appleseed “postman” nonsense that had long since gone completely out of control, thrusting upon him unasked-for responsibility for an entire civilization. Since then his life had no longer been his own. But now, he realized, he could change that!

Just walk away
, he thought.

Gordon felt his way in the pitch blackness, using the one forest skill that had never failed him, his sense of path and direction. He walked surefootedly, sensing where the tree roots and little gullies had to be, using the logic of one who had come to know woodlands well.

It required a special, remote kind of concentration to move this way in the near-total darkness … a zenlike exercise that was elevating—as detached but more
active
than that sunset meditation two days ago, overlooking the roaring confluence of the Coquille. As he walked, he seemed to rise higher and higher above his troubles.

Who needed eyes to see, or ears to hear? Only the touch of the wind guided him. That and the scent of the red cedars, and the faint salt traces of the distant, expectant sea.

Just walk away.…
Joyfully, he realized that he had found a counter incantation! One that matched and neutralized the rippling of little lights in his mind. An antidote to ghosts.

He hardly felt the ground, striding through the darkness, repeating it with growing enthusiasm.
Just walk away!

The exalted journey ended abruptly, jarringly, as he tripped over something completely unexpected—something that did not belong there on the forest floor.

He tumbled to the ground with barely a sound, a puff of snow-covered pine needles breaking his fall. Gordon scrambled around, but couldn’t make out the obstacle that had brought him down. It was soft and yielding to the touch, though. His hand came away sticky and warm.

Gordon’s pupils should not have been able to dilate wider, but sudden fear did the trick. He bent forward and the face of a dead man came into sudden focus.

Young Cal Lewis stared back at him in a frozen expression of surprise. The boy’s throat gaped, expertly slit.

Gordon scuttled backward until he came up against a nearby tree trunk. In a daze he realized he hadn’t even taken his belt knife or pouch with him. Somehow, perhaps because of the spell of George Powhatan’s mountain, he had let that deadly sliver of complacency slip in. Perhaps his last mistake.

In the dark, he could hear the rushing waters of the middle fork of the Coquille. Beyond lay the enemy’s home ground. But right now they were on this side of the river.

The ambushers don’t know I’m out here
, he realized. It didn’t seem possible after the way he had been moving around, mumbling to himself obliviously, but perhaps there had been a gap in their closing circle.

Perhaps they had been preoccupied.

Gordon understood the principles well. First you take out the pickets, then, in a rush, swoop down on the unsuspecting encampment. Those boys and old men sleeping by the campfire did not have George Powhatan with them, now. They never should have left their mountain.