David Brin - The Postman

With both hands fully occupied he couldn’t venture to untie himself. There was nothing to cut the rope with. Up, he concentrated. It’ll be better if you stand.

Slowly, he pulled himself up the rope, hand over hand. His muscles trembled, threatening cramps, and there was intense pain in his chest and back, but at last he “stood,” his ankles twisted in loops of cutting rope, holding on tight as he swung like a chandelier.

Over by the wall, Johnny Stevens cheered unabashedly. Tracy Smith and the other Army Scouts smiled. Pretty good, for a male, they seemed to say.

Cyclops sat in his cloud of supercooled mist, playing checkers with the smoking Franklin stove. They, too, seemed to approve.

Gordon tried lowering himself to get at the knots, but it put so much pressure on the loops around his ankles that he nearly fainted from the pain. He had to straighten out again.

Not that way. Ben Franklin shook his head. The Great Manipulator looked at him over the tops of his bifocals.

“Over the tops of his… over the t—” Gordon looked up at the stout beam from which the rope had been hung.

Up and over the top, then.

He raised his arms and wound the rope around them. You did this back in gymnastics class, before the war, he told himself as he began to pull.

Yeah. But now you’re an old man.

Tears flowed as he started hauling himself upward, hand over hand, helping where he could with his knees. In the blur between his eyelids, his ghosts seemed more real the more he struggled. They had graduated from imagination to first-class hallucinations.

“Go, Gordon!” Tracy called up to him.

Lieutenant Van gave him thumbs up. Johnny Stevens grinned encouragement alongside the woman who had saved his life back in the ruins of Eugene.

A skeletal shade in a paisley shirt and leather jacket grinned and gave him a fleshless thumbs up. Atop the bare skull lay a blue, peaked cap, its brass badge glimmering.

Even Cyclops ceased its nagging as Gordon gave the endless climb everything he had.

Up… he moaned, grabbing slick hemp and fighting the crushing hug of gravity. Up, you worthless intellectual.… Move or die…

One arm floundered over the top of the rough wooden beam. He held on and brought up the other to join it.

And that was all. There was no more to give. He hung by his armpits, unable to move any farther. Through the blur of his eyelashes, his phantoms all looked up at him, clearly disappointed.

“Oh, go chase yourselves,” he told them inwardly, unable even to speak aloud.

…Who will take responsibility… the coals in the fireplace glittered.

“You’re dead, Cyclops. You’re all dead! Leave me alone!” Utterly exhausted, Gordon closed his eyes to escape them.

Only there, in the blackness, he encountered the one ghost that remained. The one he had used the most shamelessly, and which had used him.

It was a nation. A world.

Faces, fading in and out with the entopic speckles behind his eyelids… millions of faces, betrayed and ruined but striving still…for a Restored United States.

For a Restored World.

For a fantasy… but one which refused obstinately to die — that could not die — not while he lived.

Gordon wondered, amazed. Was this why he’d lied for so long, why he had told such fairy tales?… because he needed them? Because he couldn’t let go of them? He answered himself,

Without them, I would have curled up and died.

Funny, he had never seen it quite that way before, in such startling clarity. In the darkness within himself the dream glowed — even if it existed nowhere else in the Universe — flickering like a diatom, like a bright mote hovering in a murky sea.

Amidst the otherwise total blackness, it was as if he stood in front of it. He seemed to take it in his hand, astonished by the light. The jewel grew. And in its facets he saw more than people, more than generations.

A future took shape around him, enveloping him, penetrating his heart.

When Gordon next opened his eyes, he was lying atop the beam, unable to recall how he had gotten there. Unbelievingly, he sat up blinking. A spectral light seemed to stream away from him in all directions, passing through the broken walls of the ruined building as if they were the dream stuff, and the brilliant rays the true reality. The radiance spread on and on, beyond limit. For a short time he felt as if he could see forever in that glow.

Then, as mysteriously as it had come, it passed. Energy appeared to flow back into whatever mysterious well he had tapped. In its wake, physical sensation returned, the reality of exhaustion and pain.

Trembling, Gordon fumbled with the knotted tourniquets around his ankles. His torn, bare feet were slippery with blood. When he finally got the ropes loosed, returning circulation felt like a million angry insects running riot inside his skin.

His ghosts were gone, at least; the cheering section seemed to have been taken up by that strange luminance, whatever it had been. Gordon wondered if they would ever return.

As the last loop fell away, he heard shots in the distance, the first since Macklin had left him alone here. Perhaps, he hoped, that meant Phil Bokuto wasn’t dead quite yet. Silently, he wished his friend luck.

He crouched down on the beam as footsteps approached the storeroom door. It opened slowly and Charles Bezoar stared at the empty room, at the limp, hanging rope. Panic filled the ex-lawyer’s eyes as he drew his automatic and stepped out.

Gordon would have preferred to wait until the man came directly underneath, but Bezoar was no idiot. An expression of dark suspicion came over his face, and he started to look up…

Gordon leaped. The .45 swung up and fired at the same instant as they collided.

In the hormonal rush of combat Gordon had no idea where the bullet went, or whose bone had cracked so loud on impact. He grappled for the gun as they rolled together across the floor.

“…kill you!” the Holnist growled, the .45 tipping toward Gordon’s face. Gordon had to duck to one side as it roared again, stinging his neck with burning powder. “Hold still!” Bezoar growled, as if he were in the habit of being obeyed. “Just let me…”

Straining against his enemy with all his might, Gordon suddenly let go of the gun with one hand and struck out. As the automatic came down toward him his right fist smashed upward into the root of Bezoar’s jaw. The bald Holnist’s body convulsed as his head struck the floor hard. The .45 fired twice into the wall.

Then Bezoar was still.

This time the worst pain was in Gordon’s hand. He stood up slowly, gingerly, semiconsciously accounting for what had to be a cracked rib, in addition to his many other bodily insults.

“Never talk while you fight,” he told the unconscious man. “It’s a bad habit.”

Marcie and Heather spilled out of the storage room and drew Bezoar’s knives. When he saw what they were after, he almost told them to stop, to tie the man up, instead.

He didn’t, though. Instead he let them do what they would and turned to step through the back door into the storage room.

It was even darker inside, but as his eyes adapted, he made out a slender figure lying on a dirty blanket over in the corner. A hand reached up toward him and a thin voice called out.

“Gordon, I knew you’d come for me… Is that silly? …

It sounds… sounds like fairy tale talk, but… but somehow I just knew it.”

He sank to his knees beside the dying woman. There had been crude attempts to clean and bandage her wounds, but her matted hair and blood-streaked clothes covered more damage than he dared even look at.

“Oh Dena.” He turned his head and closed his eyes. Her hand took his.

“We stung them, darling,” she said in a reed-thin voice. “Me and the other Scouts.… In some places we really caught some of the bastards with their pants down! It—” Dena had to stop as a fit of coughing made her nearly double up, bringing forth a trickle of ocher fluid. The corners of her mouth were stained.