They passed a bench where gray-haired workers bent over flashing lights and screens bright with computer code. A bit lightheaded from all this, Gordon felt as if he had accidentally stumbled into a bright, wondrous workshop where shattered dreams were being carefully put back together by a band of earnest, friendly gnomes.
Most of the technicians were now well into or past middle age. To Gordon it seemed they were in a hurry to accomplish as much as possible before the educated generation passed away forever.
“Of course now that contact has been reestablished with the Restored U.S.,” Peter Aage continued, “we can hope to make faster progress. For instance, I could give you a long list of chips we haven’t any way to manufacture. They would make a world of difference. Only eight ounces’ worth could push Cyclops’s program ahead by four years, if Saint Paul City can provide what we need.”
Gordon didn’t want to meet the fellow’s eyes. He bent over a disassembled computer, pretending to pore over the complicated innards. “I know little about such matters,” he said, swallowing. “Anyway, back East there have been other priorities than distributing video games.”
He had said it that way in order not to lie any more than he had to. But the Servant of Cyclops paled as if he had been struck.
“Oh. I’m so stupid. Certainly they’ve had to deal with terrible radiation and plagues and famine and Holnists.… I guess maybe we’ve been pretty lucky, here in Oregon. Of course we’ll just have to manage on our own until the rest of the country can help out.”
Gordon nodded. Both men were speaking literal truths, but only one knew just how sadly true the words were.
In the uncomfortable silence, Gordon reached for the very first question that came to mind. “So, you distribute toys with batteries, as sort of missionary tools?”
Aage laughed. “Yes, that’s how you first heard of us, isn’t it? It sounds primitive, I know. But it works. Come, I’ll introduce you to the head of that project. If anyone is a real throwback to the Twentieth Century, it’s Dena Spurgen. You’ll see what I mean when you meet her.”
He led Gordon through a side door and down a hallway cluttered with stacked odds and ends, coming at last to a room that seemed alive with a faint electric hum.
Everywhere there were racks of wires, looking much like strands of ivy climbing the walls alive. Socketed amidst the tangle were scores of little cubes and cylinders. Even after all these years, Gordon quickly recognized all manner of rechargeable batteries, drawing current from the Corvallis generators.
Across the long room, three civilians listened to a long-haired, blond person wearing the black-on-white coat of a Servant. Gordon blinked in surprise as he noticed that all four were young women.
Aage whispered in his ear. “I ought to warn you. Dena may be the youngest of all the Servants of Cyclops, but in one way she’s a museum piece. A genuine, bona fide, rip-snorting feminist.”
Aage grinned. So many things had gone with the Fall of civilization. There were words in common use, back in the old days, that one never even heard anymore. Gordon looked again in curiosity.
She was tall, especially for a woman who had grown up in these times. Since she was facing the other way, Gordon couldn’t tell much about her appearance, but her voice was low and certain as she spoke to the other intense young women.
“So on your next run I don’t want you taking chances like that again, Tracy. Do you hear me? It took a year of holding my breath and threatening to turn blue before I was able to get us this assignment. Never mind that it’s a logical solution—that outland villagers tend to feel less threatened when the emissary is a woman. All the logic in the world would come to nothing if one of you girls came to harm!”
“But Dena,” a tough-looking little brunette protested. “Tillamook’s already heard of Cyclops! It was just a quick hop over from my own village. Anyway, whenever I take Sam and Homer along they just slow me—”
“Never mind!” the taller woman interrupted. “You just take those boys with you next time. I mean it! Or I promise you I’ll have you back in Beaverville in two shakes, teaching school and making babies.…”
She stopped abruptly as she noticed that her assistants weren’t paying attention anymore. They were staring at Gordon.
“Dena, come over and meet the Inspector,” Peter Aage said. “I’m sure he’d like to see your recharging facility and hear about your—missionary work.”
Aage spoke to Gordon, sotto voce with a wry smile. “Actually, it was introduce you or face a broken arm. Watch yourself, Gordon.” As the woman Servant approached, he said louder, “I have some matters to look into. I’ll be back in a few minutes to take you to your interview.”
Gordon nodded as the man left. He felt somehow exposed here, with these women staring at him this way.
“That’s it for now, girls. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon and we’ll plan the next trip.” The others protested with entreating looks. But Dena’s head shake sent them out the door. Their shy smiles and giggles—as Gordon tipped his cap—contrasted with the long knives each wore at hip and boot.
Only when Dena Spurgen smiled, offering Gordon an outstretched hand, did he realize how young she had to be.
She can’t have been more than six when the bombs went off.
Her grip was as firm as her demeanor, and yet her smooth, barely calloused hand told of a life spent more among books than threshers and plows. Her green eyes met his in frank inspection. Gordon wondered when he had last met anyone like this.
Minneapolis, that crazy sophomore year, came his answer. Only then she had been a senior. Amazing I should remember that girl now, after so long.
Dena laughed. “Have I your permission to anticipate your question? Yes, I am young and female, and not really qualified to be a full Servant, let alone to be put in charge of an important project.”
“Forgive me,” he nodded, “but those were my thoughts.”
“Oh, no problem. Everybody calls me an anachronism, anyway. The truth is, I was adopted as a waif by Dr. Lazarensky and Dr. Taigher and the others, after the Anti-Tech Riots killed my parents. I have been spoiled terribly since, and learned how to take full advantage. As, no doubt, you guessed on overhearing what I had to say to my girls.”
Gordon finally decided her features could best be described as “handsome.” Perhaps a bit long and square-jawed. But when she was laughing at herself, as now, Dena Spurgen’s face lit up.
“Anyway,” she added, motioning at the wall of wires and little cylinders. “We may not be able to train any more engineers, but it doesn’t take much brains to learn how to cram electrons into a battery.”
Gordon laughed. “You’re unfair to yourself. I had to take introductory physics twice. Anyway, Cyclops must know what he’s doing, putting you in this job.”
This brought a reddening to Dena’s face as she blushed and looked down. “Yes, well, I suppose so.”
Modesty? Gordon wondered. This one is full of surprises. I wouldn’t have expected it.
“Oh rats. So soon. Here comes Peter,” she said in a much softer voice.
Peter Aage could be seen negotiating the clutter in the hallway. Gordon looked at his old-fashioned mechanical watch—one of the techs had adjusted it so that it no longer ran half a minute fast on the hour. “No wonder. My interview is in ten minutes,” he said as they shook hands again. “But I do hope we’ll have another chance to talk, Dena.”
Her grin was back. “Oh, you can bet we will. I want to ask you some questions about the way life was for you, back in the days before the war.”
Not about the Restored U.S., but about the old times. Unusual. And in that case, why me? What can I tell her about the Lost Age that she can’t learn by picking the memories of anyone else over thirty-five?
Puzzled, he met Peter Aage in the hallway and walked with him through the cavernous warehouse toward the exit.
“I’m sorry to rush you off like this,” Aage told him, “but we musn’t be late. One thing w
e don’t want is for Cyclops to scold us!” He grinned, but Gordon got the feeling Aage was only partly jesting. Guards bearing rifles and white armbands nodded as they passed outside into overcast sunshine.
“I do hope your talk with Cyclops goes well, Gordon,” his guide said. “We’re all excited to be in contact with the rest of the country again, of course. I’m sure Cyclops will want to cooperate in any way he can.”
Cyclops. Gordon returned to reality. There’s no delaying this. And I don’t even know if I’m more eager than scared.
He steeled himself to play out the charade to the end. He had no other choice. “I feel exactly the same,” he said. “I want to help you folks any way I can.” And he meant it, with all his heart.
Peter Aage turned away to lead him across the neatly mowed lawn toward the House of Cyclops. But for a moment Gordon wondered. Had he imagined it, or had he seen, for just a moment, a strange expression in the tech’s eyes—one of sad and profound guilt?
7
CYCLOPS
The foyer of the House of Cyclops—once the OSU Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—was a striking reminder of a more elegant era. The gold carpet was freshly vacuumed and only slightly frayed. Bright fluorescents shone on fine furniture in the paneled lobby, where peasants and officials from villages as far as forty miles away nervously twisted rolled-up petitions as they waited for their brief interviews with the great machine.
When the townsmen and farmers saw Gordon enter, all of them stood up. A few of the more daring approached and earnestly shook his hand in calloused, work-roughened clasps. The hope and wonder were intense in their eyes, in their low, respectful tones. Gordon froze his mind behind a smile and nodded pleasantly, wishing he and Aage could wait somewhere else.
At last, the pretty receptionist smiled and motioned them through the doors at the end of the foyer. As Gordon and his guide passed down the long hallway to the interview chamber, two men approached from the other end. One was a Servant of Cyclops, wearing the familiar black-trimmed white coat. The other—a citizen dressed in a faded but carefully tended prewar suit—frowned over a long sheet of computer printout.
“I’m still not sure I understand, Dr. Grober. Is Cyclops sayin’ we dig the well near the north hollow or not? His answer isn’t any too clear, if you ask me.”
“Now Herb, you tell your people it isn’t Cyclops’s job to figure everything down to the last detail. He can narrow down the choices, but he can’t make the final decisions for you.”
The farmer tugged at his overtight collar. “Sure, everybody knows that. But we’ve gotten straighter answers from him in th’ past. Why can’t he be clearer this time?”
“Well for one thing, Herb, it’s been over twenty years since the geological maps in Cyclops’s memory banks were updated. Then you’re also certainly aware that Cyclops was designed to talk to high-level experts, right? So of course a lot of his explanations will go over our heads … sometimes even we few scientists who survived.”
“Yes, b-but …” At that moment the citizen glanced up and saw Gordon approaching. He moved as if to remove the hat he was not wearing, then wiped his palm on his pants leg and nervously extended it.
“Herb Kalo of Sciotown, Mr. Inspector. This is indeed an honor, sir.”
Gordon muttered pleasantries as he shook the man’s hand, feeling more than ever like a politician.
“Yes sir, Mr. Inspector. An honor! I sure hope your plans include coming up our way and setting up a post office. If they do, I can promise you a wingding like you’ve never—”
“Now Herb,” the older technician interrupted. “Mr. Krantz is here for a meeting with Cyclops.” He looked at his digital watch pointedly.
Kalo blushed and nodded. “Remember that invite, Mr. Krantz. We’ll take good care of you.…” He seemed almost to bow as he backed down the hall toward the foyer. The others didn’t appear to notice, but for a moment Gordon’s cheeks felt as if they were on fire.
“They’re waiting for you, sir,” the senior tech told him, and led the way down the long corridor.
Gordon’s life in the wilderness had made his ears more sensitive than these townsmen perhaps realized. So when he heard a mutter of argument ahead—as he and his guides approached the open door of the conference room—Gordon purposely slowed down, as if to brush a few specks of lint from his uniform.
“How do we even know those documents he showed us were real!” someone up ahead was asking. “Sure they had seals all over them, but they still looked pretty crude. And that story about laser satellites is pretty damn pat, if you ask me.”
“Perhaps. But it also explains why we’ve heard nothing in fifteen years!” another voice replied. “And if he were faking, how do you explain those letters that courier brought? Elias Murphy over in Albany heard from his long-lost sister, and George Seavers has left his farm in Greenbury to go see his wife in Curtin, after all these years thinking she was dead!”
“I don’t see where it matters,” a third voice said softly. “The people believe, and that’s what counts.…”
Peter Aage hurried ahead and cleared his throat at the doorway. As Gordon followed, four white-coated men and two women rose from a polished oak table in the softly lit conference room. All except Peter were clearly well past middle age.
Gordon shook hands all around, grateful that he had met them all earlier; for it would have been impossible to remember introductions under these circumstances. He tried to be polite, but his gaze kept drifting to the broad sheet of thick glass that split the meeting room in two.
The table ended abruptly at that division. And although the conference room’s lighting was low, the chamber beyond was even darker. A single spotlight shone on a shimmering, opalescent face—like a pearl, or a moon in the night.
Behind the single, gleaming, gray camera lens was a dark cylinder on which two banks of little flashing lights rippled in a complex pattern that seemed to repeat over and over again. Something in the repetitious waves touched Gordon inside.… He couldn’t pin down exactly how. It was hard to tear his gaze away from the rows of winking pinpoints.
The machine was swaddled in a soft cloud of thick vapor. And although the glass was thick, Gordon felt a faint sense of cold coming from the far end of the room.
The First Servant, Dr. Edward Taigher, took Gordon by the arm and faced the glass eye.
“Cyclops,” he said. “I’d like you to meet Mr. Gordon Krantz. He has presented credentials showing him to be a United States government postal inspector, and representative of the restored republic.
“Mr. Krantz, may I present Cyclops.”
Gordon looked at the pearly lens—at the flashing lights and the drifting fog—and had to quash the feeling of being like a small child who had seriously overreached himself in his lies.
“It is very good to meet you, Gordon. Please, be seated.”
The gentle voice had a perfect human timbre. It came from a speaker set on the end of the oak table. Gordon sat in a padded chair Peter Aage offered. There was a pause. Then Cyclops spoke again.
“The tidings you bring are joyous, Gordon. After all these years caring for the people of the lower Willamette Valley, it seems almost too good to be true.”
Another brief hiatus, then, “It has been rewarding, working with my friends who insist on calling themselves my ‘Servants.’ But it has also been lonely and hard, imagining the rest of the world to lie in ruins.
“Please tell me, Gordon. Do any of my brothers still survive in the East?”
He had to blink. Finding his voice, Gordon shook his head. “No, Cyclops. I’m very sorry. None of the other great machines made it through the destruction. I’m afraid you are the last of your species left alive.”
Though he regretted having to give it the news, he hoped it was a good omen to be able to start out by telling the truth.
Cyclops was silent for a long moment. Surely it was only his imagination when Gordon thought he heard a faint sigh, almost like a sob. br />
During the pause, the tiny parity lights below the camera lens went on flashing, as if signaling over and over again in some hidden language. Gordon knew he had to keep talking, or lose himself in that hypnotic pattern. “Uh, in fact, Cyclops, most of the big computers died in the first seconds of the war—you know, the electromagnetic pulses. I can’t help being curious how you yourself survived it.”
Like Gordon, the machine seemed to shake aside a sad contemplation in order to answer.
“That is a good question. It turns out that my survival was a fortunate accident of timing. You see the war broke out on Visitor’s Day, here at OSU. When the pulses flew, I happened to be in my Faraday cage for a public demonstration. So you see …”
Interested as he was in Cyclops’s story, Gordon felt a momentary sense of triumph. He had taken the initiative in this interview, asking questions exactly as a “federal inspector” would. He glanced at the sober faces of the human Servants, and knew he had won a small victory. They were taking him very seriously indeed.
Maybe this would work out, after all.
Still, he avoided looking at the rippling lights. And soon he felt himself begin to sweat, even in the coolness near the superchilled pane of glass.
8
In four days the meetings and negotiations were over. Suddenly, before he had really prepared himself, it was time to leave again. Peter Aage walked with Gordon, helping him carry his two slim saddlebags toward the stables where his mounts were being readied.
“I’m sorry it took so long, Gordon. I know you’ve been anxious to get back to work building your postal network. Cyclops only wanted to fix up the right itinerary for you, so you can swing through north Oregon most efficiently.”