“It’s no good, Cyclops.”
Beyond the thick pane of glass, a pearly, opalescent eye stared back at him from a tall cylinder swaddled in cool fog. A double row of tiny, flickering lights rippled a complex pattern over and over again. This was Gordon’s ghost . . . the specter that had haunted him for months now ... the only lie he had ever met to match his own damnable fraud.
It felt proper to do his thinking here in this darkened room. Out in the snows, on village stockades, in the lonely, dim forests, men and women were dying for the two of them—for what he, Gordon, supposedly represented, and for the machine on the other side of the glass.
For Cyclops and for the Restored United States.
Without those twin pillars of hope, the Willametters might well have collapsed by now. Corvallis would lie in ruins, its hoarded libraries, its fragile industry, its windmills and flickering electric lights, all vanished forever into the lowering dark age. The invaders from the Rogue River would have established fiefdoms up and down the valley> as they had done already in the area west of Eugene.
The farmers and aged techs were battling an enemy ten times more experienced and capable. But they fought anyway—not so much for themselves as for two symbols— for a gentle, wise machine that had really died many years ago, and for a long-vanished nation that existed now only in their imaginations.
The poor fools.
“It isn’t working,” Gordon told his peer, his fellow hoax. The row of lights replied by dancing the same complex pattern that burned in his dreams.
“This heavy winter has stopped the Holnists, for now. They’re kicking back in the towns they captured last autumn. But come springtime they’ll be back again, picking away at us, burning and killing until, one by one, the villages sue for ‘protection.’
“We try to fight. But each of those devils is a match for a dozen of our poor townsmen and farmers.”
Gordon slumped in a soft chair across from the thick sheet of glass. Even here, in the House of Cyclops, the smell of dust and age was heavy.
If we had time to train, to prepare . . . if only things had not been so peaceful here for so long.
If only we had a real leader.
Someone like George Powhatan.
Through the closed doors he could hear faint music. Somewhere in the building there lifted the light, moving strains of Pachelbel’s Canon—a twenty-year-old recording playing on a stereo.
He remembered weeping when he had first heard such music again. He had been so eager to think something brave and noble still existed in the world, so willing to believe he had found it here in Corvallis. But “Cyclops” turned out to be a hoax, much like his own myth of a “Restored United States.”
It still puzzled him that both fables thrived more than ever in the shadow of the survivalist invasion. They had grown amid the blood and terror into a something for which people were daily giving their lives.
“It’s just not working,” he told the ruined machine again, not expecting an answer. “Our people fight. They die. But the camouflaged bastards will be here by summer, no matter what we do.”
He listened to the sweet, sad music and wondered if, after Corvallis fell, anyone anywhere would listen to Pa-chelbel, ever again.
There was a faint tapping on the double door behind him. Gordon sat up. Other than himself, only the Servants of Cyclops were allowed in this building at night. “Yes,” he said.
A narrow trapezoid of light spilled in. The shadow of a tall, long-haired woman stretched across the carpeted floor.
Dena. If there was anyone he did not want to see right now . . .
Her voice was low, quick. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Gordon, but I thought you’d want to know at once. Johnny Stevens just rode in.”
Gordon stood up, his pulse rising. “My God, he got through!”
Dena nodded. “There was some trouble, but Johnny did get to Roseburg and back.”
“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!”