"That's up to the bone pickers," Bloom said, referring to Valentine's grim-faced hatchet men who'd been inspecting captured vehicles and gear since they arrived, sorting the salvageable wheat from the chaff that would be left to Valentine to make of what he would.
Valentine rubbed his fresh-shaven chin. "Since this is the last meeting of this particular staff, I feel like we should have something."
"A cake?" Bloom asked.
"I was thinking some of our friend's doughnuts."
"The nut at the gate?" Bloom's clerk asked. "They're good doughnuts, but you have to hear his sermonizing about Kur and the elevation of mankind."
"Might want to roust him for a few days, so he can't count us walking out," Moytana said.
Valentine and a corporal went to get doughnuts. They took bicycles down to the entrance to the base. Bee loped along behind. Some idlers were watching the Kentuckians build small, heat-conserving homes on the other side of the old Evansville highway running west of the base.
"Mind if we take a sack?" Valentine asked the missionary.
"One to a customer, sir. Did you read that literature I gave you?"
"Fascinating stuff," Valentine said. "I have eight friends. One to a customer means I need eight doughnuts."
"Oh, that makes sense," the missionary said, reaching into a shelf in his bakery van. "Did you get to the part about the select gene rescue and propagation?"
"No."
"A well-formed man like you would do well to try out. And don't worry. Less than three percent end up castrated."
"That must have been in the fine print."
"You know, this is an evil land. Best leave it to escape what is coming. The punishment."
"Punishment?"
"I take no joy in it. It's heartbreaking. But the fools will persist in their folly."
"True enough. How long will you keep handing out doughnuts?"
"Until it begins. There will be a sign, a sign from the sky. Beware the evil star! Take it to head and heart, friend and brother. There's a shadow of death over this land. It's flying closer and closer." He handed Valentine a bag so greasy that the paper was next to transparent and went back to scanning the sky.
"I don't suppose you know what direction the danger is coming from."
"The worst dangers blossom in one's own bosom. Look to your heart, friend and brother. Watch the skies, my friend and brother. Watch the skies!"
Lost in the sleep of the exhausted that night, Valentine dreamed he was back in Weening.
The last time Valentine had stopped in Weening, they were using the Quickwood tree he'd planted as a maypole, dancing around it every spring. One of the local preachers accused the family who organized the event of being druids.
Valentine had placed the seed there years ago. What Valentine wanted were some specimens of Quickwood tucked away here and there throughout the Ozarks, just in case-a Johnny Appleseed of resistance to the Kurians.
The tree he'd planted in Weening would be mature in another year or two, if what Papa Legba had told him on Hispaniola about the tree's life cycle was correct. It would be producing seeds for others to distribute.
That was the essence of his dream. The young coffee bean- like Quickwood seeds were dropping off the tree and rolling into the brush while he and Gabby Cho stood waist deep in the nearby stream. The seeds turned into scarecrows, and the scarecrows divided and turned into more scarecrows, all of whom stood in the fields and woods around Weening, all subtly turned toward himself and Cho as they shivered, naked and exposed in the river.
"Repurposed." Southern Command doesn't call it a retreat, or abandonment, or evacuation. Word has come down from on high: What's left of Javelin is being "repurposed."
General Martinez calls it a part of his "new approach" to the war against the Kurians.
Admittedly, General Martinez was, is, and continues to be a controversial figure. What the precise proportion of malfeasance, malpractice, and misjudgment went into his tenure as the Southern Command chief general is the object of some dispute. There are still those who maintain that Martinez's only fault was to see to the welfare of the men under his command first and foremost, only fighting when it was absolutely necessary.
But a wise man knows that in life, absolutes vanish like a desert mirage, receding into an unknown distance before it can be quantified.