Edward Llewellyn - Prelude to Chaos

He sat down behind his desk and studied me. “We will offer you a salary. Paid in gold. But there will be other perquisites available to those skilled outsiders who serve the Light by aiding the Settlement.”

“Other perquisites? Such as?”

He did not answer me directly, but toyed with a calculator on his desk as though the instrument might help him decide what manner of man I was. “I trust that the Light will fall upon you, and that you will decide to become one of us. But, whether you become a Believer or not, I hope that you will stay and marry Judith.”

“Marry Judith?” I stared at him, then laughed. “Judy will have something to say about that!”

He reverted from Combat Commander to Deacon. “Judith is an unusually willful woman. But she is fertile and intelligent. We do not want to lose her genes. Her husband will have to be a man with sufficient strength of will to reeducate her in the true role of womanhood. She must make up her mind to marry very soon. You may be the man to persuade her. And we are about to revive some of the old tried and true methods of bringing erring Believers back into the Lighted Way. Methods both physical and psychological. I hope that you will be able to persuade Judith to marry before such methods are needed in her case.” There was no humor in his voice or his eyes. “In this sterile age a fertile woman who remains unmarried is an abomination!”

I gave Judith a week to cool down from our last encounter, then I ran her to earth in the yard behind the hospital. She was washing bedpans.

“Some job for a surgeon!” I joked.

That was the wrong joke. She looked up at me and snarled, “I’ve been demoted to orderly. They’ll have me scrubbing floors soon!” She straightened and pushed back a lock of her Titian hair. “Those macho incompetents! They don’t know their ass from their elbow!” Her language had deteriorated with her status. “I tried to tell ’em some of the ways surgery’s advanced since Lister. So they tossed me out as OR nurse. And now I’m cleaning toilets to earn my keep.” She studied me and her green eyes were hard. “How’s the Deacon’s pet military adviser making out?”

I shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. And nobody else can. But I didn’t come here to swap insults. I came here to help you.”

“Help me? How?”

I shifted uncomfortably. How the hell was I going to introduce the subject of matrimony? A subject I had always avoided. “Judy, you’re the only unmarried woman in the place.”

“So?”

“Well—I’m not the marrying kind. But I’m willing to make an exception in your case.” I again attempted humor. “Let me take you away from all this!” I pointed at the bedpans.

She threw down the one she was cleaning and advanced to face me. “Put it plainer, Gavin Smith!”

“I’ve decided to stay in Sherando for a while.” I took the plunge. “I’m willing to marry you.”

She stared at me. “You think you’re doing me a favor by offering me your unpleasant self? Rescuing me from spinster-hood?” She took a deep breath and blasted on. “Why didn’t you mention marriage before? When you were trying to back me up onto your bed?”

“Judy—I’m not trying to do you a favor. I mean, if you’re going to stay here—well—it’ll make it easier for you if you’re tied up with some man. Like all the other women are. We could split later if you didn’t like—” My voice trailed away under her glare.

“Is this an original idea of yours? Or am I part of the package Anslinger’s selling you?”

“Of course you’re not a part of any deal! There isn’t any deal! I’m only suggesting you marry me for your own good.”

I wasn’t saying what I meant to say, and what I was saying was the wrong thing.

She stood with her hands on her hips; the classical picture of the outraged female. “And who suggested marrying you would be good for me?”

“Nobody. But Anslinger did mention—”

“Tell your pal Anslinger to go and jump into that lake he’s having dug! I didn’t break out of the Pen to hole up in this heretic Settlement with an escaped con as a husband!” She snatched up her washrag. “I’d rather go on cleaning shit out of bedpans for the rest of my life than share a bed with you, Gavin Knox—or whatever your name is!” And with that verbal overkill she swung on her heel and marched back into the hospital, her face flushed and her hair gleaming.

The constructions of surface fortifications is an art which declined with the development of high explosives in the nineteenth century, and was made archaic with the arrival of nuclear warheads in the twentieth. Military engineers were ordered to build fortresses long after they had become obsolete death-traps—Maginot, Corregidor, Siegfried, Dienbienphu, Moonbase—gaunt memorials to engineering success and military error. From the time when Jubal Early fought his way north up this very valley every infantryman has known that the best fortress is a hole in the ground and his best defensive weapon an entrenching tool.

However if Sherando was ever attacked, something I still though unlikely, it would be by mobs or bandits with neither nukes nor artillery. In designing its defenses, therefore, I had looked to military history rather than current practice (the Settlement had an excellent library, with restricted access). Standing on the earthworks the bulldozers had flung up on each side of the main entrance I felt rather like an artist viewing his first attempt to paint in tempera because oils were no longer available: the reviver of an antiquated art. The last great builder of effective fortresses had been Vauban, Marshal of France and Chief Engineer to Louis XIV; I was his lonely successor, building this small fortress in the Shenandoah Valley after the pattern of the great fortresses he had built to defend France. And I had enjoyed learning what he had taught. The placing of inner and outer ramparts, of running outworks, of angling defensive faces flanked by other faces; a polygon of major and minor bastions with intersecting fields of fire. All utterly useless against airborne attack, heavy artillery, or properly handled armor. But impregnable, if properly defended, to unorganized mobs or untrained troops.

1 had worked hard through the first half of the summer creating something of doubtful value in real war but impressive to those who knew nothing of war. The mere fact I hat masses of earth were being bulldozed around, ramparts raised, ditches dug, angles measured, fire fields laid out, had •lone much to convince the Council that all this activity proved its own necessity. That defenses were needed. And (hat I was needed.

One of Sheriff Jenkins’s new deputies came scrambling up the rampart. “The Deacon has a visitor in the Council Chamber, Mister Smith. He would like you to meet him there.” The Deputy spoke with respect. The population of Sherando had become increasingly respectful of Anslinger as his influence had increased and, by extension, had shown increased respect for me. The fate of certain Settlements in countries where government was collapsing had added weight to Anslinger’s insistence that if we didn’t want that to happen to us we had better start doing something about it now while we still had powerful friends in Washington and Richmond. He had also quoted the Teacher to prove that failure to defend the Centers of Light (the Settlements) against the Forces of Darkness (all outsiders except collaborators like me) was a sin against the Light. Deacon Anslinger had a genius for combining common sense, political insight, and religious dogma into an argument for reaching Puritan goals by draconian methods.

A request from him was tantamount to a command. I slid down the rampart and walked across the plaza, wondering which of the friendly outsiders now regularly visiting Sherando I was to meet. Of one thing I was sure; until the defenses of the Settlement were finished Anslinger was not going to betray me to anybody.