David Brin - The Postman

Powhatan talked on, conversationally. “We are prisoners in similar cages… although you seem to relish yours.… Alike, we’re both trapped by the last arrogance of arrogant days…”

“You aren’t…”

“Come now, General,” Powhatan smiled without malice at his captor. “Don’t look so surprised.… Surely you didn’t believe you and your generation were the last?”

Macklin must have instantly reached the same conclusion as Gordon — understanding that George Powhatan was talking only in order to buy time.

“Macklin!” Gordon shouted. But the Holnist wasn’t distracted. In a blur his long, machetelike knife was out, glittering wetly in the lamplight before slashing down toward Powhatan’s immobilized right hand.

Still bent and unready, Powhatan reacted in a twisting blur. The blow that landed tore only a glancing streak along his arm as he caught Macklin’s wrist in his free hand.

The Holnist cried out as they strained together, the General’s greater strength pushing the dripping blade closer, closer.

With a sudden step and hip movement, Powhatan fell backward, flicking Macklin overhead. The General landed on his feet, still holding on, and wrenched hard, in turn. Whirling like two arms of a pinwheel, they threw each other, gaining momentum until they disappeared into the blackness beyond the ring of light. There was a crash. Then another. To Gordon it sounded like elephants trampling the undergrowth.

Wincing at the pain of mere movement, he crawled out of the light far enough for his eyes to begin adapting to the darkness, and pulled up under a rain-drenched red cedar. He peered in the direction they had gone, but was unable to do anything more than follow the fight by its tumult, and the skittering of tiny forest creatures fleeing the path of destruction.

When two wrestling forms spilled out into the clearing again, their clothes were in tatters. Their bodies ran red rivulets from scores of cuts and scratches. The knife was gone, but even weaponless the two warriors were fearsome. In their path no brambles, no mere saplings endured. A zone of devastation followed them wherever the battle went.

There was no ritual, no elegance to this combat. The smaller, more powerful figure closed with ferocity and tried to grapple with his enemy. The taller one fought to maintain a distance, and lashed out with blows that seemed to split the air.

Don’t exaggerate, Gordon told himself. They’re only men, and old men, at that,

And yet a part of Gordon felt kinship with those ancient peoples who believed in giants — in manlike gods — whose battles boiled seas and pushed up mountain ranges. As the combatants disappeared again into the darkness, Gordon experienced a wave of the sort of abstract wondering that had always cropped up in his mind when he least expected it. Detached, he thought about how augmentation, like so many other newly discovered powers, had seen its first use in war. But that had always been the way, before other uses were found… with chemistry, aircraft, space-flight.… Later, though, came the real uses.

What would have happened, had the Doomwar not come… had this technology mixed with the worldwide ideals of the New Renaissance, and been harnessed by all its citizens?

What might mankind have been capable of? What, if anything, would have been out of reach?

Gordon leaned on the rough trunk of the cedar and managed to hobble to his feet. He wavered unsteadily for a moment, then put one foot in front of the other — limping step by step in the direction of the crashing sounds. There was no thought of running away, only of witnessing the last great miracle of Twentieth-Century science play itself out under pelting rain and lightning in a dark age forest.

The lantern laid stark shadows through the crushed brambles, but soon he was beyond its reach. Gordon followed the noises until, suddenly, it all stopped. There were no more shouts, no more heavy concussions, only the rumbling of the thunderheads and the roar of the river.

Eyes adapted to the darkness. Shading them from the rain, he finally saw — outlined against the gray clouds — two stark, reddish shapes standing atop a prominence overlooking the river. One crouched, squat and bull-necked, like the legendary Minotaur. The other was shaped more like a man, but with long hair that whipped like tattered banners in the wind. Completely naked now, the two augments faced each other, rocking as they panted under the growling storm.

Then, as if at a signal, they came together for the last time.

Thunder rolled. A blinding staircase of lightning struck the mountain on the opposite river bank, whipping the forest branches with its bellow.

In that instant, Gordon saw a figure silhouetted against the jagged electric ladder, arms outstretched to hold another struggling shape overhead. The blinding brightness lasted just long enough for Gordon to see the standing shadow tense, flex, and cast the other into the air. The black shape rose for a full second before the electric brilliance vanished and darkness folded in again.

The afterimage felt seared. Gordon knew that that tumbling figure had to come down again — to the canyon and jagged, icy torrent far below. But in his imagination he saw the shadow continue upward, as if cast from the Earth.

Great sheets of rain blew southward down the narrow defile. Gordon felt his way back to the trunk of a fallen tree and sat down heavily. There he simply waited, unable even to contemplate moving, his memories churning like a turgid, silt-swirled river.

At last, there was a crackle of snapping twigs to his left. A naked form slowly emerged from the darkness, walking wearily toward him.

“Dena said there were only two types of males who counted,” Gordon commented. “It always seemed a crackpot idea to me. But I never realized the government thought that way too, before the end.”

The man slumped onto the torn bark beside him. Under his skin a thousand little pulsing threads surged and throbbed. Blood trickled from hundreds of scratches all over his body. He breathed heavily, staring at nothing at all.

“They reversed their policy, didn’t they?” Gordon asked. “In the end, they rediscovered wisdom.”

He knew George Powhatan had heard him, and had understood. But still there was no reply.

Gordon fumed. He needed an answer. For some reason, deep within, he had to know if the United States had been ruled, in those last years before the Calamity, by men and women of honor.

“Tell me, George! You said they abandoned using the warrior type. Who else was there, then? Did they select for the opposite? For an aversion to power? For men who would fight well, but reluctantly?”

An image: of a puzzled Johnny Stevens — ever eager to learn — earnestly trying to understand the enigma of a great leader who spurns a golden crown in favor of a plow. He had never really explained it to the boy. And now it was too late.

“Well? Did they revive the old ideal? Did they purposely seek out soldiers who saw themselves as citizens first?”

He grabbed Powhatan’s throbbing shoulders. “Damn you! Why didn’t you tell me, when I’d come all that way from Corvallis to plead with you! Don’t you think I, of all people, would have understood?”

The Squire of Camas Valley looked sunken. He met Gordon’s eyes very briefly, then looked away again, shuddering.

“Oh, you bet I’d have understood, Powhatan. I knew what you meant, when you said that the Big Things are insatiable.” Gordon’s fists clenched. “The Big Things will take everything you love away from you, and still demand more. You know it, I know it… that poor slob Cincinnatus knew it, when he told them they could keep their stupid crown!

“But your mistake was thinking it can ever end, Powhatan!” Gordon hobbled to his feet. He shouted his anger at the man. “Did you honestly think your responsibility was ever finished?”