We had been in Turkey for another ten months when Father was called to Garden City for the final time. The frontier had been kind to us; it had given us three full seasons of peace in spite of our deteriorating technological abilities, while in the capital city great changes had been taking place. Soon after Cleander's death the Senate had seated itself to hear the Concerned One speak upon a new agenda for the Empire he had told the senators he wished to announce within their hallowed chamber. The Concerned One was yet riding a wave of popular approval in the aftermath of the chamberlain's bloody downfall. The Senate was expecting him to use the moment to propose either a new campaign against the Chinese or to initiate a public rebuilding program. Every one of the distinguished gentlemen and ladies present was dressed in his or her ornate finery of silk and gold and sat on the plush seats hoping against experience that the Concerned One would at last emerge as the second Mathias they had long awaited. Their hopes should have been directed toward something else. The emperor entered that grand room wearing a ragged pair of denim shorts and a tattered straw hat that sat upon his head at a rakish angle; over his shoulder he carried a pole on the end of which was a hobo's kit tied into a red bandana. Into the Senate's sanctuary the Concerned One brought with him his gaggle of athlete friends along with his mistress Marcie Angelica and the huge wrestler Norman. Marcie was dressed in a manner similar to the emperor and had freckles painted on her nut-brown face. The nearly insensate Norman had on a pair of bib overalls, and was painted on his face and body with black greasepaint and bore in one hand a boat oar. None of the senators could bring himself to speak until the emperor had planted himself on the high throne directly in front of them. Those in the front row sat gaping as if under a spell; the ones in the back benches pretended to be looking at an interesting spot on the ceiling high above the emperor's head. Caleb Coppola, an elderly senator from a distinguished family—meaning his ancestors had toadied to generations of the very powerful better than almost anyone else—was the first to rise and speak.
“Welcome, Emperor Luke Anthony, the Concerned One, the Conqueror of Britain, the Friend of Peace, the—,” he said, and was going to list the rest of the emperor's honorary names until the emperor held up a hand to signal him to stop.
“There is no Concerned One any longer,” said the emperor. “Not in my current human form, anyway. He does, I know, live on among you citizens of Pan-Polaria in loving memory.”
Mr. Coppola had served fifty years in the Senate. A man does not prosper in dangerous circumstances for that long without being able to shift his position when the ground beneath him shifts. He made a swift appraisal of the situation and said, “My old eyes have betrayed me. Who is it, my lord, that I am addressing?”
“Sometimes I am called the One Who Has Come,” said the emperor. “Sometimes Mr. Hercules. Today I am appearing before you as Tom Sawyer, one of my preferred earthly guises. Be not afraid, my friends. I may be the king of heaven, but as long as I am in human shape, I am much like any of you. Therefore, you may look upon me, and your eyes will not fall from their sockets, which they would do, I promise you, were I to assume one of my more awesome forms. Of course, even now I could crush all of you just by making a fist.”
He flexed the muscles in his forearms to show them this was so.
“I see,” said Senator Coppola, who was in fact doubting everything he was hearing and seeing.
The emperor explained that Marcie was now Huckleberry Finn, the boon companion of the fun-loving Tom. The giant Norman was, by the emperor's grace, the Negro Jim, but the senators were not to be offended by the presence of a slave; the emperor could, with a nod of his head, also make Norman resemble the king of Persia, if there still was a Persia and it still had a king—the emperor could not remember that morning.
“I thought it was only right to make him my companion after the cruel trick that was played on him,” the emperor said.
“What trick was that, my lord?” asked Senator Coppola.
“When Huck pretended to be dead,” said the emperor, much perturbed the senator did not know the story. “Have you not read the account written by Mr. Clemens?” he asked.
“I am very old. Many years have escaped me since I read of you in school. I had forgotten…, ” said Senator Coppola.
He started to sit down, then quickly stood upright again.
“May I seat myself, my lord?” he asked.
The emperor allowed he might, but from that moment forward Coppola and the other people of the Empire would have to prostrate themselves whenever they were in the emperor's vicinity.
“I am a god now,” he said. “The god, if one wants to quibble over titles. Gods have to be shown proper respect by you chaps who are someday going to be rotting corpses.”
He paused to adjust his shorts, a garment that, much to the discomfort of the senators in the front rows, kept riding up on his beefy legs.
“Else I will have to destroy you,” the emperor said. “I don't want to. Don't care if I do, either. The matter is entirely up to you. I am disconnected from your concerns.”
He rose from his throne, and every senator fell upon his face in response. The emperor remembered something as he went toward the exit and returned to the throne platform to say, “I nearly forgot to tell you: there are going to be some big changes happening in your world soon.”
The senators cautiously reseated themselves and listened.
“For instance,” said the emperor, “Garden City is no more. No one can use that name any longer, unless he is referring to past events. You are currently living in the Mausoleum of the Concerned One, which I have named in honor of my former incarnation. I want the road signs, the coins, the rest of the what-you-call-thems changed as soon as you can manage it to reflect the city's new designation. I realize you are mortals and cannot do these things as quickly as I would want. You should also realize I can be a wrathful god when I am disappointed. Should you tarry at this assignment, I may have to take action to speed you at your task. Remember my history in the guise of the mighty Hercules: I have slain my own wife and children. Do you think I would hesitate to kill a roomful of old men?”
The signs were altered and new coins were minted two days later.
As he had told Father during our previous visit to the capital, the emperor/god had discovered Drummond's book upon the first twelve rulers of the Pan-Polarian Empire; the actions of his predecessors recorded therein had given the emperor countless new notions of governance. He would sit upon a balcony in the palace, killing flies for hours on end as his predecessor Timor had done, although the earlier emperor had used an energy ray to perform the deed and the man born Luke Anthony only had a prosaic swatter. The Emperors John and Juno had once had months of the years named after them, so the emperor/god who used to be the Concerned One renamed the entire year after his honorific titles: the Wild One, Lucky, Pius, Luke, Windy, Glistening, Canadian, Holy, Hercules, Roman, Trusting, and the Expected One replaced the traditional names of the twelve months. (The name of the last month became the title by which the emperor most often wanted to be addressed.) Because he had read how the emperor Cepheus had practiced every form of sexual depravity, the current emperor did him one better by keeping hundreds of young men in the palace whom he dressed in women's clothing and named after male and female body parts. He delighted in offending important visitors to the palace by kissing and fondling his peculiar new companions whenever he knew his guests would be watching. When he reread of how Darko had failed to fight the huge conflagration in the old capital city of Washington, the emperor was inspired to commit a still larger crime: he ordered the City Guardsmen to set the city ablaze and to protect only the palace and other public buildings. The flames they set destroyed most of central Garden City, some of which was centuries old. The former Christian church once known as the National Cathedral burned to ashes. The sacred Bell of Liberty, the most hallowed object in the Empire, was melted into a lump of bronze when the museum it was in was set aflame. The fire likewise destroyed the beautiful Temple of Peace, which many said was a sign that the Empire would never again know serene times and was also an incident that caused other citizens to ask why the Pan-Polarians had ever bothered to build a temple dedicated to peace. The emperor claimed the black wasteland the fire left in the heart of the city was now imperial property, and he proclaimed a day of thanksgiving because he had been given the chance to build a city worthy of himself.
“Now you will have more than a stadium to remember me by when I have ascended again onto Olympus,” he told the Senate on a day he was dressed in his Hercules outfit.
On that same occasion he assured the senators they need not worry much about the homeless families the holocaust might have created; he had ordered the City Guardsmen to set the fires at night while the affected people were sleeping, and so most of the potentially dislocated had perished along with their homes.
“You are fortunate I think of these little details,” the emperor told them.
The Concerned One—I still called him that in spite of his new titles—rarely spoke to the citizens not part of the government. He let Marcie go to the common people for him. On the occasion of one of her speeches she rode through the streets dressed as a warrior from some earlier age and astraddle an enormous black charger from which she proclaimed to the spectacle-hungry folk what glorious plans the emperor had for them. The tall, awe-inspiring concubine told them there would not only be public work projects to reconstruct the center of the city, there would be more athletic shows, and everyone would have double their usual dole allotments, simply because the emperor was so very fond of his people. She was an uncommonly good speaker for one of her background. She used short words the people understood, and she was loud. The people came to love the tall woman in a blonde wig, a woman they, like the emperor, now called “the Amazon”; they perhaps loved her more than they loved the emperor himself, as she was one of them, and was even more abusive of the wealthy than the Concerned One was. Rich and noble citizens despised her with a fury equal to the commoners' love. Marcie was lowborn, a woman and a whore, and she had the power to issue claims upon property and to kill anyone objecting to her methods. “See how they quiver before a woman!” she would proclaim from the back of her dreaded horse when she was preparing to pounce upon another victim. Once whatever prey she had selected was dead, she would use the same black horse to drag the dead man's body over the pavement, and she would ask the people, “What good are his titles today? Who now cares what the name of his great-grandfather was? Look at him: yesterday he had two hundred servants to bathe and feed him; today he is fed to us.” Her supporters painted images of her on thousands of city walls; always they depicted her as the triumphant Hippolyte, the mythical queen of the Amazons, about to gut another cowering rich man. Other scribblers working under the cover of night would write “whore” or “murderer” underneath her pictures.
Garden City's graffiti artists were less kind to Marcie's consort, for many among them hated him for his corrupt government and for his lack of dignity and for his failure to respond to the destruction of our technologies and because—and I will put the matter in writing as delicately as I can—the Concerned One had developed a singular physical problem that made even him more ridiculous than he had been before. A certain embarrassing swelling (embarrassing to everyone else, but not to the emperor) had arisen in the area of the emperor's groin. No one had noted this peculiar growth while the Concerned One still wore his purple emperor's suits; when he went about dressed in the scanty fur kilt of Hercules or in Tom Sawyer's denim shorts, the condition was obvious to all who beheld him. On the occasion I first looked upon him after our return to Garden City, Helen and I were seated across from the imperial box in the Field of Diversions and from a considerable distance we could see more of the emperor's unseemly growth than any sane person would have wanted to behold. One of his matronly admirers near us blurted out, “He is the greatest man in the world! See how happy he is to look over the thousands of pretty girls he rules!” The fool woman had no idea what she was seeing. Something terrible had befallen the once achingly handsome son of Mathias; his face had reddened, and the tip of his nose had become bulbous since the time of Cleander's death. While he retained his massive, powerful figure, he no longer moved with his old speed when he fenced with his mates, and his skin was developing a rash that would slowly turn into clusters of open pustules. The graffiti artists drew obscene representations of the stricken emperor—most of which I cannot describe without sounding as puerile as the artists were—on the clean white walls of every new building the Concerned One erected. Even the supposedly sacred new Temple of Peace hosted grotesque caricatures of him. The joke among the irreverent scribblers in the city was that because of their pictures the Concerned One was truly building something for which he would be forever remembered.
The emperor/god forgot to welcome Father to the city for weeks after our arrival via Tampico. We learned immediately after we made port that the Concerned One had called the other leading men from the provinces into the capital, and was too busy harassing them to bother with Father at that time. While he was both evil and insane, the emperor must have had a few lucid moments when he recalled that Father had twice saved his useless life. I believe within his fevered mind there was a compartment that held Father to be a handy old patriot he could summon to duty in the most dangerous instances. As for the other generals, the Concerned One imagined they were constantly plotting against him. Some of them of course were, which to the Concerned One justified the threats and the occasional death sentences he apportioned to some of his other commanders. We in Father's household were meanwhile yet again left hanging in Garden City. Father had no official duties, and we had no inkling of whether he would be accepted as a friend or a foe when the emperor at last summoned him to the palace.
We did, as I have said, see the emperor from afar at the arena soon after our return from the East. On the occasion of the memorable Winter Festival games of that year the Concerned One fought as a modern gladiator against a man given a wooden sword to use against the emperor's steel one. The Concerned One had previously slain wild animals in athletic exhibitions on other occasions. This combat against humans was an innovation in his history of disgraceful conduct. Hunting is noble—or so most important men hold it to be so—but fighting other men for money is not. Crowds on the day of the emperor's fight filled the gigantic stadium to overflow capacity. For months before word had gone throughout what was left of the Empire that the Concerned One would debase himself in this fashion, and most of the citizens were eager to see him do so. The lower classes cheered the titled fool as he entered the arena in his golden armor; they threw fistfuls of carnations on him when he took a preliminary lap around the interior wall separating the adoring populace from the bloody artificial turf. The commoners screamed like a whole army of drunken Russians when the emperor commenced to whacking away at this opponent's wooden weapon with his metal blade. The sight offended the senators and governmental officials in attendance, but they too raised their hands and cheered because Marcie and a host of City Guardsmen were watching them to ascertain who among their number were not completely delighted. At the contest's end, the Concerned One spared his opponent's life after he had hacked only a few nasty gashes in the unlucky gladiator's chest and face. For this victory, the professional athletes' guild awarded the emperor a bag of gold double-eagle coins that he brandished about the arena for everyone to see. The people clapped themselves to exhaustion in response to his heroism. Then, contrary to the normal order of convict matches followed by wild animal slaughter followed by athletic matches, the emperor's friends fought some matches against each other. It is a curious thing to recount, since this was the blood-soaked Field of Diversions we were in, yet none of the contestants in these fights of the Winter Games were really injured, as the contestants were—as they proudly shouted to the crowd before each mock duel—the emperor's companions and were above getting hurt. These favored athletes pulled their blows and put on great displays of false agony when anyone's weapon came within an arm's length of anyone else. They broke open packets of pig's blood to simulate wounds when they felt wounds were needed, and the crowd pretended to love their efforts. Everyone cheered and applauded as loudly as they had for the Concerned One. I wondered if any of the 180,000 present thought it ironic that in an era when almost no one else was safe, paid combatants fighting in the Field of Diversions were not injured by so much as a splinter in one of their fingers. The finale of the games was a shooting exhibition performed by the Concerned One and selected marksmen from within his circle. From the safety of the elevated walkway the emperor had used at previous shows, they shot dead a beautiful orange-and-black tiger imported from India, several tall birds, some wild goats that were as graceful as swifts when they frantically leapt in vain against the high arena walls, and lastly they shot a huge, leathery rhinoceros of a sort I had not seen before. (Some said it was an African unicorn, a description that only demonstrates how far Africa is from the glorious realms of mythology.) The emperor shot this last beast seven times and failed to kill it. The great wrinkly thing merely became more enraged the more he wounded it, until it became so angry it charged the carbon filament supports holding up the elevated ramp. The mighty creature bent one vertical beam cleanly in half, sending the emperor onto his imperial backside. The African “unicorn” might have torn the entire edifice down and trampled the Concerned One into the green plastic grass but for a squadron of City Guardsmen who charged into the arena and emptied their assault rifles into the furious animal. Hundreds of rounds were needed to send the beast from this world, and thirty Guardsmen were necessary to drag it to the center of the field, where the emperor/god posed with a foot propped atop his vanquished prey. Everyone declared aloud they had never seen a braver man than he. They screamed for a half an hour as he strutted about the enclosed battleground in his Hercules outfit. Women exposed their breasts to him in hopes of making his eyes linger on them an additional second. Poor men threw the last coins in their purses at the emperor's feet. (The Concerned One or someone in his circle had foreseen the possibility of this transpiring, and small boys were present to dash onto the turf and gather up the coins for the emperor's treasury.) Senators lowered their faces onto the concrete, swearing as they debased themselves that they were overawed by the emperor/god. My father the general missed all of this. During the first sword fight he had put a wet cloth over his head and had gone to sleep in the warm sunshine. The shouting of his neighbors covered the loud snoring he did while the emperor moved from victory to greater victory on the green surface below the towering grandstands. Father awoke upon hearing the trumpet call announcing the end of the spectacles. He declared to his legal wife the outing had exhausted him and he needed to go home and take a nap.
When someone in the palace at last remembered Father was in the city, a messenger brought the general a summons to meet with the emperor on the following afternoon. Since the heart of the city remained mostly windblown ashes, Father had to walk across a black wasteland to get to his interview. The remains of that man-made disaster turned Father's pristine white officer's uniform to a shade of dirty gray miles before he could reach the palace gateway. Yet he should not have bothered making the grim journey, as Father soon learned the trip would be for naught. The emperor/god's mortal parts were ill that day, and he was receiving no one. In a corridor near the emperor's living quarters Father did meet Marcie. She demanded to know who this dusty old man wandering about the home of a god was.
“We have met before, madam,” he said. “I am General Peter Black, the governor of Turkey.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed because he was not someone there to be executed, “the old Nestor.”
“Pardon, madam?” said Father.
“Nestor, you dunce,” she said. “You know: the elderly chap in the Greek book about Troy. He lived in the past, didn't he? The emperor calls you that.”
“He summoned me,” said Father.
“He won't be seeing anyone for a while,” said Marcie. “Don't worry. He has no grievance against you. He likes you. It's the other army rats he is going to come down on. Some of those bastards will be a head shorter before this is over.”
“Before what is over, madam?” asked Father.
“The transformation of the city, the blossoming of the earthly paradise, and the rest of it,” she said, and pointed this way and that to show she was speaking of something that involved all of creation. “You should keep up with current events.”
“Do you know why I am in Garden City?”
“In the Mausoleum of the Concerned One,” she corrected him.
“Recalled from Turkey,” suggested Father, for he could not force himself to say the absurd new name Luke Anthony had given the capital.
“He wants everyone of importance to remain in the Mausoleum of the Concerned One,” she said. “They cannot conspire against him while they're right under his nose.”
She told him to go home. The emperor would summon him again when he was feeling better. While he waited day after empty day for that interview to happen, Father learned he scarcely knew his legitimate wife after his many years of absence. While they lived together in the small house in the Field of Heroes, Father found their relationship had fared better when he was dwelling under a roof in distant Asia or in some other residence that was not near the capital. He awoke in the mornings to find her staring in disgust at his sun-blackened face and his gnarled soldier's hands. When she spoke to him during the daylight hours, she often as not reminded him of how much nobler her family had been than his before they two were married.
During the afternoon his wife would have her women friends over to gossip and sew floral designs on their clothing, flowers being the traditional symbols of Pan-Polarian nobility. If Father lingered there, the women sat in the front room staring in his direction, as if awaiting him to spring upon them like a wild beast. His wife's friends thought Father a vulgar rube on account of his coarse dining habits, for he was a soldier and soldiers must eat quickly when they have the opportunity. The same women thought he might be a foreigner because he pronounced his vs as though they were bs and elided his vowels; the society women asked (in not particularly polite fashion) if he had been reared in the Middle East since he spoke such terrible English.
When a prominent family in the neighborhood came over to visit—and one of them came nearly every day—Father found it easier to spend his hours of inaction in the small garden out back or by taking long walks to the city's bustling street markets. While he strolled through neighborhoods that were completely changed from his younger days, Father felt like a stranger in the city he had known briefly in his youth. He did not recognize the songs the street minstrels sang in the public places; the new tunes were filthy ditties in Spanish about the emperor's physical condition or about his harem of odd young men and not the old military ballads Father remembered.
There were theaters everywhere in the city, many more than when he had been a young man and people still had hologram sets and other electronic equipment. When he went inside some of these new establishments, he discovered that the actors he saw did not perform the old plays written in English and instead did outlandish deeds on stage such as mutilating themselves with daggers to please the drunken, sullen audiences; nor did Father understand why so many actors impersonated women and in front of hundreds of spectators did things with other men that would have earned them a trip to the mines had they done them in public thirty years before.
Every day on the streets there was some sort of native holiday; there were always long processions and the din of trumpets and drums. No one, however, could explain to Father what was being celebrated. Every city block seemed to contain a brothel that had blonde women hanging from its open windows. Every alley held naked beggars crouching in the winter cold as they pled for money or drugs. Father could not speak to many people on the streets in English (neither in the real sort nor in that of the army camps) or in Syntalk or even in the Spanish still common in the rest of Mexico; much of Garden City spoke either an obscure tongue from a faraway land, or they used a patois composed of dozens of different languages, only snatches of which could he comprehended. Father could no more have had a conversation with one of these citizens than he could with the sparrows feeding on the filth in the open sewers. The friends of Father's childhood were either long since dead or hiding from the modern world in remote country estates and hoping to die of old age before anyone discovered where they were or the new diseases or gangs got to them.
Father was only comfortable in Garden City whenever he came to visit Helen and me in our rented lodgings; while with us he could play dominoes against his servant Medus or listen as I read from Dickens and Jane Austen. I upbraided him during these frequent visits for rambling about the city unprotected. At that time groups of armed hoodlums were rampant in the often unpatrolled streets; these young thugs wore short hooded robes to hide themselves and had long knives they carried in their belts; everyone in our tenement building said these hooded youths ambushed their individual victims in swarms the way a pack of wolves falls upon a single deer and that a solitary person had no defense against them.
“Who would attack me?” was Father's response to my warnings. “Do I look like I have money?” he would ask.
“Sir, there are groups of wealthy youths who kill for the pleasure of killing. They think it a kind of sport. Money means nothing to them,” I told him. “They care nothing of how you look.”
Helen agreed with me. She told a gory story of a baker murdered in a street neighboring our flat to illustrate she knew what she was talking about.
“An old wives' tale,” huffed Father. “People could not be so cruel…people who aren't emperor, I mean. I know the Pan-Polarians better than you provincial folk. I know they do not do such things.”
“You haven't lived among them for forty-six years, sir,” I told him. “The only Pan-Polarians you know are professional soldiers, and they only call themselves that.”
“Aren't they citizens?” demanded Father.
“Some of them are,” I allowed.
“Aren't my soldiers the same as these chaps loitering about here in Garden City?” he asked. “I admit there's not much order here. That's because no one has taken charge of the situation. Told them what they should be about. People are the same everywhere you go. I blame the city's leadership. Teach these people how to behave and some useful machine skills, and this town would whip itself into shape quite nicely.”
I sighed at his ignorance. Both Medus and Helen did likewise; which was impudent of them, seeing as how they were hired servants, no matter how familiar they were to us. Happily, Father remained as unperceptive as he usually was and was not offended by anything they did.
“So you say, sir,” I said. “You still should have a guard when you go walking.”
He said the day he took orders from women would be the last day he walked anywhere. He continued to rove around the dangerous city as freely as a cloud scudding across a summer sky. The thieves he passed on the streets must have thought him a lunatic to roam about the disintegrating buildings looking like a character from an antique farce. His clothes were from some other historical era; his ragged hair, his odd speech, his sunburnt visage all declared him to be a penniless bumpkin in town to attend a festival or to beg alms. Garden City's legions of criminals consequently left him alone and sought victims elsewhere.
When Father was next summoned to the palace, the emperor was up and active, too active and much too furious to spare a word on General Black. Marcie had overseen yet another bloodletting upon several noble families. These executions of imaginary criminals had further convinced the emperor plotters were everywhere among the powerful. At the time Father arrived the emperor was abusing the ears of some goons among the City Guardsmen and some senior officers from the regular army who had let someone escape his mistress's clutches; even now, the emperor was shouting, even now this escapee was making plans to assassinate him. Father sat in the same antechamber he had sat in eleven years earlier when he had witnessed the murders of two innocent men and was splattered with their guiltless blood. This time a butler brought Father some food and drink while he listened to the muffled sounds filtering through the tall iron doors protecting the palace's interior. Most of the other provincial generals were inside those doors and enduring the full blast of the emperor's insane harangue. Some of them had been virtual prisoners in the palace since the time of Cleander's death. The Concerned One would have killed these long-term “guests” of his for conspiring against him while they were on the frontiers, except that he feared their replacements would be no more trustworthy. He figured the current generals were at least of a known quality, as imperial agents had spied upon them for years. The emperor told his captive generals each day he was a god—or at least a god in the image of a man—and he abused the military men for never showing him adequate reverence due a genuine deity. Some of them, the Concerned One observed, were slow to prostrate themselves to him. Only a few of them had memorized his honorific names. “Did you think I, a god, wouldn't notice?” Father heard him scream through the iron doors. Abdul Selin was among those the emperor made a special effort to browbeat. The smuggling and extortion rackets the enormous Selin clan had long practiced in their Tunisian homeland looked to an outsider like the emperor to be proof of a conspiracy of some sort; that the Selins were also members of an odd and highly secretive sun cult testified to some sort of sinister plot, or so it did in the emperor's opinion. As a criminal syndicate, a vast extended family, and a unique religious order, the Selins shielded themselves with triple layers of protection from any imperial agents attempting to penetrate their numbers. The Concerned One hated this pack of hairy little men infiltrating his military and civil administration. He feared them with an equal ardor, for the Selins were an enigma to him, as they were to everyone else within the Empire. For what he knew of them, killing one of their members, particularly a powerful member such as General Abdul Selin, might bring retaliation. Paralyzed by his fears, the emperor had to settle for bombarding the Selin clan with threats, hoping that might make them as frightened of him as he already was of them. I did not witness any of the sessions the emperor had with his generals. Drawing from what I had seen of him, I could imagine how a man of Abdul Selin's temperament took the hard words the mad emperor threw in his direction. Selin would not forget these constant dressing-downs, nor would he be one to forget that Father did not have to endure the humiliations visited upon him and the other commanders. That day at the palace would certainly not be one he would set aside in his mind after he met Father in the antechamber minutes after the emperor had yelled himself hoarse and had retired for the evening.
“So, Black,” said Selin, bursting into the room and showing his very white teeth through the black tangle of his beard, “I see the emperor's favorite is allowed to sit out here and nibble cheese like a pet mouse while he screams at the rest of us!”
“I am hardly his favorite, sir,” said Father, and brushed the crumbs off his face.
“Do you know what his oversized bitch called me today?” asked Selin, referring to Marcie. “That whore! The Concerned One, or whatever he calls himself these days, he lets the slut call me a hairy monkey!” (His small body tightened like a rope pulling a heavy weight when he thought of her.) “She put a collar on General Lamb and made him bark like a dog! ‘Bark!’ she says, and he did! She tries to put a collar on me, and I will snap her neck!”
Selin ripped a handful of wiry hair from his own beard to demonstrate his rage. Blood swelled from his face and down his chin, yet his glistening teeth remained fixed. Two of his family cronies, easily identified by the large sun-face decals they bore upon their military tunics, had followed Selin into the small room from the interior rooms; they quickly retreated behind the molded doors when they witnessed the mood of their clan leader.
“You really should control your anger, sir,” said Father. “Look what you've done to your face. What must you be doing to your internal organs? My doctor tells me anger can cause ulcers and—”
Father did not continue because Selin had let go a shriek so terrible it made Father's ears buzz for several moments after the other man was again silent.
“You will know everything about my anger, someday!” Selin swore to him. “One day I will tear your heart out and eat it like I would an apple! First, I will roast you unto death over a campfire! I will stretch you on a wheel and peel your hide off! I will stick a glowing poker down your throat and make your lungs pop! You will beg me to bring the fatal blow!”
“Why do you say such things to me?” asked Father. “I am an old man. I saved your army for you.”
“You…you…you ancient simpleton!” groaned Selin, and had to hold his hands over his abdomen, for an unnameable something had erupted inside him with such force his guts ached. “Someday I will teach you a final lesson!” he hissed at Father; then he hurried from the room to vent his fury on his hapless relatives, two of whom he would beat to death before the morning.
Because the Concerned One already had absolute power and the inclination to execute anyone at any moment, Father decided he had greater worries than what Selin was promising to do at some indefinite point in the future. Father reasoned the emperor was still very young and would be ruling long after he and Selin had gone to their separate versions of paradise. Everyone of importance had told Father that if the emperor died in the immediate future his successor would be either Fabian Clement or Patrick Herman Pretext, the leading lights in the Senate; the former was the greatest orator of the day, and the latter was a very old man everyone esteemed—using the low standards of our time—as an extremely distinguished man simply because he was so very old. Father thought the upper classes and the City Guardsmen would never support a provincial strongman of Selin's ilk. General Emile Lamb, the fellow Selin had seen bark like a dog, commanded the City Guardsmen at that juncture. Unlike his predecessors in that post, Lamb had little power and functioned under the close scrutiny of the emperor's spies. Everyone agreed he was a nobody. The other important office in the emperor's court, that of chamberlain, belonged to Able Einman, another weak functionary the emperor's men (and Marcie's) kept tied to a short rope. Thus there was no one in a position to challenge the Concerned One's rule, and should the son of Mathias eventually regain a portion of his long-absent sanity, Father believed Selin's animosity toward him could bring no one any harm, for power would long lie somewhere other than in the little Turk's hands.
Father did not know General Lamb was an associate of Selin's and like Selin a worshiper of Helios; they had attended the same private school when they were boys and had made a blood pact when they were young men at home in Tunis to help each other rise in the world when they were older. Lamb was obligated to do little while he was under the Concerned One's thumb in the capital. He was there fully employed in the job of keeping his head atop his shoulders. He nonetheless did somehow convince the emperor one night when the Concerned One was more intoxicated than usual to sign an order sending Selin back to the Great Plains. Selin there would be free from the emperor's outbursts and in control of the Empire's largest army. The little Turkish gangster slipped from Garden City in the middle of an otherwise uneventful night, the emperor's orders in hand. He flew north on the Pan American Highway in the company of ten thousand of his relatives, certain he would outlive the troubles to come and equally certain many of the men he left behind in the capital would not. If history were not a dunderhead, she would record Selin began his assent to absolute power that night he extracted himself from the fiasco that was taking place in Garden City and fled to his troops in the grasslands of the windy American plains.
When the spring of the emperor Luke Anthony's last year on Earth came slithering into the Mexican high country, the emperor/god decided the time had arrived for a grand ceremony involving the entire population to mark the refounding of Garden City as the Mausoleum of the Concerned One. He announced he would plow a furrow in the earth around the entire circumference of the capital to replant symbolically the city the Aztecs had founded but failed to name after the son of Mathias the Glistening. All of the leading citizens, including Father, and some three hundred thousand less prestigious folk, came to a cornfield beyond the southern suburbs to cheer on the divine sower of cities in this great endeavor. The Concerned One arrived in his Hercules outfit and riding atop a golden chariot. He gave an impromptu oration to the assembled, explaining that he had dealt with oxen before: he had captured the herds of Geryon and the Cretan bull when he was working for the late King Eurystheus. The crowd was very polite to him; only a few small boys snickered at the mad emperor's retelling of mythological tales from another civilization, and those impudent little imps were buried deep in the massive throng, in places the City Guardsmen could not single them out. The Concerned One posed behind his animal-driven plow for a team of photographers and artists while the latter drew sketches for a commemorative coin. Thirty minutes later, after a shout of encouragement from his City Guardsmen, the emperor cracked his whip over the broad backs of what must have been the fattest oxen in Mexico, and the plow inched forward. An hour into the wonderful task, the emperor/god and his entourage realized something they should have known before they began: plowing a furrow around a city containing twenty million residents was not a job to be accomplished in a single afternoon, and perhaps not in several weeks of sunny afternoons. (Imagine, some of the Guardsmen said, what the job would have been like a few years before, when there were forty million people in the city.) Furthermore, there were tree roots, hedges, roads, rivers, walls, and elevated aqueducts in the emperor's path, and none of these objects were as impressed with the Concerned One's divinity as he was. By the time the midday sun became the evening sunset, the emperor had not progressed far enough to be out of sight of his starting point. He kept running into a new obstacle every few steps and was repeatedly cursing his beleaguered City Guardsmen, who had to chop away at whatever was in the plow's path. The capital's leading men meanwhile grew red in the bright sunlight. Their wives fanned themselves and complained of the heat. My weary father had seen men plow before; he did not care to see another one, so he sat himself beneath an oak tree, and in its comfortable shade took a nap that lasted until after dark. The emperor by then was longing for his dinner more than for completing his monumental chore.
“Now that I have begun this menial job,” he told the anxious, hungry crowd, “let us return to the affairs of state. These sturdy beasts”—he meant the fat, indolent oxen—“will, by my command, complete the circuit around the city on their own. Should they defy my wishes, let the world know I will return to destroy them!”
He and nearly everyone else went home to eat, leaving behind a detachment of City Guardsmen to continue plowing the endless furrow. The instant they were alone, the soldiers hit upon the ingenious idea of taking the plow out of the ground and dragging it along the surface of the earth so the steel triangle would meet much less resistance. Even under these new conditions, the soldiers still needed ten long days to drag the plow all the way around the city. Their completed furrow was a mere scratch across the topsoil, which, when one considers the fate of Mausoleum of the Concerned One, was a more fitting tribute to the new city than the City Guardsmen could have ever anticipated.
The emperor/god financed some additional athletic exhibitions to celebrate the great renaming of the city. To pay for these new shows the Concerned One committed a host of fresh murders and confiscated the property of his wealthy victims. In one nighttime purge he killed most of the living ex-speakers of the Senate, the Pedros brothers, Marcello and Samsung from the speculators' guild, and the reigning governor and tribune for the people in California. While he was at it, he executed his nephew Albert Anthony and his father's cousin Anne Kelbertson. These last two victims had been friends to the emperor's concubine Marcie, if a cold-hearted killer like Marcie Angelica could be said to have friends. That the Concerned One would kill members of his own family awoke a terrible new fear in the make-believe queen of the Amazons. The commander of the City Guardsmen, General Lamb, and the chamberlain Einman were quick to impress upon her the notion that anyone, absolutely anyone, could be the next to die. Einman attempted to sway her because he was as terrified of the mad emperor as everyone else was. Lamb, as I have said, was Abdul Selin's man in the imperial court and was eager to undermine the emperor any way he could. The Concerned One increased Marcie's anxiety when he put to death four members of his harem on the preposterous charge of having had sexual relations with the late Cleander, when everyone knew Cleander never had been affectionate with anyone; all four of these women had been close friends of the chief concubine before she rose in the world. The day following their executions the emperor killed every one of his long-time athlete comrades (save for Norman) because he said they had touched his godly body during wrestling matches and thus were no longer fit to live among the mortals.
“I had to turn them into gods,” he explained to his City Guardsmen the morning he examined his friends' butchered corpses lying within one of his gardens. “They would not have been happy staying here after having gotten a feel for heaven.”
Marcie did not have to be reminded she touched parts of the divine person every night.
“Whom will he murder tomorrow, my lady?” General Lamb must have whispered in her ear countless times. “A man who would kill his wife would give no thought to killing his mistress”—for General Lamb and Marcie both knew the emperor had killed his wife Barbara in 2288.
The byword of the Concerned One's rule—“I can, therefore I will”—became, in his last year on the throne, “I can do anything.” He made noblemen dance naked for him in the palace gardens. Those few who refused to obey him would be thrown to wild beasts so they might amuse him as they perished. His dinner guests were each night forced to eat food mixed with human excrement while he watched and laughed at their distress. Among his retainers he kept at his elbow throughout his waking hours was an unspeakable young man he called “the Ass”; on those evenings simple torture did not lift the Concerned One's soul to the heights he wished to scale, he would watch while the Ass abused little boys and girls. The emperor was so pleased with this criminal he made him a priest in the new religion of the Living Hercules. At one dinner party while the Ass was performing for the Concerned One and his horrified guests, the degenerate performed acts of such piety the emperor took a pistol from a City Guardsman and sent his favorite to dwell in heaven with his athlete friends. “Such a great artist is wasted upon this world,” said the Concerned One as he kicked the Ass's body to make certain he was completely gone. That summer the emperor declared bulls to be sacred and demanded followers of Invictus to sacrifice humans instead during their baptismal rites. Armed with his Herculean club he sometimes stalked the palace corridors on nights he could not sleep and would on impulse beat to death anyone he happened to meet. He would scream for hours over the dead like a lion roaring over its prey. In celebration of the longest day of the year he dressed a hundred deformed and crippled men in tight linen casings, laid them on the floor of his throne room, and while the City Guardsmen stood around the doomed men in a square the Concerned One shot the wretched men while they struggled against the tight clothing and their emperor screamed, “I'm killing Hera's snakes!” (The doomed men were not scholars and would not have known that the goddess Hera supposedly sent giant serpents to kill the infant Hercules in his cradle, although the young hero slew them first.) One autumn day in the fighters' school behind the Field of Diversions, the Concerned One heard someone in the crowd laugh while the athletes were training. He thought the bemused spectators were laughing at him; therefore he had his City Guardsmen seal the exits, sweep through the stands in formation, and kill everyone present.
Marcie did her best to keep him drunk as often as possible. When he was full of liquor, he became dull and inactive, and would not kill anyone until he slept off his stupor. It was unfortunate for the Empire that his athletic training kept him sober far too often, and there was no safety for any within the reach of his power.
Yet the common citizens continued to love their emperor through these long months of carnage. These were fat times for most of those in the city when compared to the years of famine and disease. While the money lasted and the trade routes within Mexico remained open, the public dole was more generous than it had been only months before. As I have said, the emperor's building projects in the city employed tens of thousands of formerly idle men. I have not yet observed that the standards of these projects were agreeably lax, and much could be built slipshod and more still could be stolen by those owning a construction contract. The new diseases and the emperor's whims had eliminated scads of property owners, and anyone with a little capital to invest in land or ships now had plenty of chances to take the places of the dead. The metal plagues had crippled the foreign powers as much as they had the Pan-Polarian Empire, and thus the remaining lands within the emperor's control remained secure, for the moment. New mines in western Mexico had given the Empire an apparently inexhaustible supply of gold and silver coin with which our merchants could import all the food, drink, clothing, and artisan-made luxury items our people could still consume. The speculators and the moneylenders ruling the Empire's trade from their market stalls in the city's central plaza grew as rich as the kings of most other nations. A man of wealth but of low birth, such as Father's patron Mr. Golden, could afford to buy a place in society his ancestors could not have dreamed of. Such men could now live in villas high in the cool, dry surrounding hills. They brought to their new homes small armies of servants and bodyguards, exactly as the aristocrats had done for centuries. Their wives could wear silk and turquoise like Egyptian princesses and have teams of Mexican servants stand beside them to sweep away the flies with fans made of gigantic feathers. It was almost as good as having air-conditioning back. Their children could grow to be as fat and as arrogant as the young aristocrats already were, while their merchant fathers wallowed in the myriad carnal delights of the privileged. In such almost golden times, the commoners were forgiving of the Concerned One's personal excesses. Such things did not harm them.
“Of course he does bad things in the palace,” a woman living in the tenement apartment under Helen and me told me, “but he does them to the rich. Who cares what he does to those bastards? They have been robbing the world for a couple hundred years. Let them have a taste of the supper they've been serving to everybody else. Let him take his boot off their necks, and they would start bullying us again. The emperor is our defender. We need him more than ever now that we don't have the things we used to have. The machines, I mean.”
The last time Father was summoned to the palace, the defender of the people, the man/god Hercules, the emperor of most of the northern world had let Marcie Angelica get him roaring drunk again. The Concerned One lay undressed on his vast bed, half conscious of everything near him in his candle-illuminated sleeping chamber. Rather than turn Father away another time, Marcie allowed Father to sit in the flickering light on a stool near the side of the bed.
“He has asked for you specifically,” the concubine told Father. “Something about wolves.”
The emperor heard her say “wolves,” and he roused himself and shouted, “Where are they?!”
“They are not here, precious,” said Marcie, and stroked the curly hair on his head. “Lie down. We are safe in the palace.”
“Who's this?” he asked of Father.
“General Peter Black,” she said. “You called for him.”
“Old Blackie was a good sort,” said the Concerned One, lying fully on his back once more. “I'm pretty certain I killed him years ago. Lined him up against the wall and shot him. This one is an imposter. Have the guards take care of him.”
“No, precious,” Marcie advised him. “This really is General Black. He has come from the East to visit us.”
“Get a lamp in here!” ordered the emperor. “I need to see this with my own eyes. So many damned spies around.”
A City Guardsman fetched a blazing oil lamp for him, and the Concerned One had the man hold the light to Father's face while the emperor rolled on his left side to have a clear look at his guest.
“Why, it is the old coot!” he announced. “Didn't Cleander find some way of bumping you off?” he asked.
“Apparently not, my lord,” said Father.
“Have you seen any wolves about?” asked the Concerned One.
“Not in Garden City, my lord,” said Father. “We have many in Asia.”
“Could you get some for me, old boy?” asked the emperor, focused for the moment on this peculiar subject. “I want to shoot some in the Field of Diversions.”
“I suppose I could, my lord,” said Father. He glanced at Marcie and the soldier holding the lamp; both of them were old hands in the palace and had learned to keep a blank face when the Concerned One got to ranting. Father took his cue from them.
“Remember in Progress, way out there in Siberia, when we still had Siberia, before Daddy went to heaven,” said the Concerned One, “how the wolves used to steal from the forest after sundown. I could see their gray heads moving in the night. Like they were floating in front of the undergrowth. They were terrible, weren't they, Blackie? I watched them from my window for hours before I went to sleep. They would wait and wait for their chance. I have to get rid of them. They've gotten into my dreams, you know. Take the Turkish divisions and go into Siberia and round them up. I will finish them one by one in the pure light of the arena.”
Aiming at a target he alone could see, the emperor aimed an invisible rifle in the hushed bedroom air.
“Every wolf in Siberia, my lord?” said Father. “That would be a large project. There are so many…. ”
“Because the goddamned Chinese protect them!” said the emperor with more feeling than twenty sane men would use in a year. “Round the Chinese up, too! Ha! That would be something! Speaking of China, do you know what they found there?” (He sat upright in his bed to tell Father this in a whisper.) “Merchants coming from that part of the world say they found…a whole flock of white ravens. Pure white, old man. When they found their nests, they cracked open the eggs and out came lizards! Little wiggling lizards! They say it's the end of the world. I have a woman from Egypt who saw the same thing in the sky. Not lizards; the end of the world, I mean. Even the damned stupid priests of something or other I have here in my capital saw an omen inside some albino calf they found. They cut it open, and there was nothing in there. Nothing.”
“The mystics are always telling such tales, my lord,” said Father, who believed in Sophia and nothing else.
“They tell tales because of the damned wolves!” said the emperor, and rolled onto his back. “They will tell them until every wolf is gone.” (He ordered the City Guardsman away, and put an arm across his face to shield his eyes from the lamplight.) “What would you do, Black, if I let you do anything you wanted? Anything? I mean absolutely anything?”
Father did not have to reflect much upon the question.
“I would like to return to Turkey, my lord,” he said. “I have a garden there, and I need to get my flowers in before the rains come.”
“If you could do anything you wanted,” asked the astonished emperor/god, “you would go back to Turkey and raise flowers?”
“Yes,” said Father.
“Wouldn't we all?” whispered the emperor, and he rolled over on his stomach and fell back into a deep sleep.
Father would not speak to the Concerned One again. We saw him from afar three weeks later in the Field of Diversions when the emperor once more frolicked as a modern gladiator before the bloodthirsty thousands. These were the traditional Thanksgiving games of November, the occasion the Concerned One chose to stage the largest wild animal show Garden City had witnessed in her long and sanguinary history. Following his custom, the emperor climbed his elevated platform and with his rifle dispatched hundreds and hundreds of exotic animals that had more beauty and grace than he and his dying Empire ever would. The Concerned One spent the equivalent of a year's budget for the entire city on this one grotesque exhibition that took two full days to complete. For this one spectacle, our old acquaintance Mr. Golden and his friends in the market made millions on special importations from independent trading companies in Africa and South America. The frightful waste further proved to the emperor's supporters how much he loved them. To his detractors he proved again he remained the same monster he ever was, only now he was growing somewhat worse in appearance and manners. At the show's long-anticipated finale on the second day, the emperor slew a hippopotamus, a fat river horse from the Nile that could not protect itself from his bullets outside its muddy water; the emperor had to shoot the bewildered creature eleven times, making the entirety of its tough exterior bleed torrents of red before it collapsed. For once the crowd became disgusted with their hero. Some reckless boys sitting high in the cheap section booed loudly at the emperor as he climbed down from his platform to pose over the mutilated beast. The offended ruler glared into the stands. A few boys insulting him was to him the same as if the entire world had. As much as he wanted to, he could not kill 180,000 at one setting as he had massacred the smaller crowd at the fighters' school. To vent his wrath he snatched up the head of an emu he had killed earlier in the show and ran into the portion of the grandstands in which the senators were seated in their crisp, linen suits. He shook the severed bird's head at the prominent men and screamed, “I can do this to you just as easily!” The politicos did not quiet his rage by bowing their faces down to the cement arena steps. The emperor screamed at them and at the crowd as the people ran toward the exits before he could sic his City Guardsmen on them. At the palace that evening the emperor smashed the furniture in his dining hall, threw his golden crowns at the walls, abused his servants with his club, and committed the one crime he had previously avoided: he beat his concubine Marcie Angelica. The City Guardsmen commander, General Lamb, was watching from within the forest of a garden peristyle as the emperor slapped her face and dragged her by her hair about the inlaid marble floors. “Why didn't you stop them?!” Luke Anthony demanded of her each time he brought his fists down upon her. With every blow, Lamb could see the emperor bringing himself a little closer to his grave.
On the third day of December, two weeks after the emperor had threatened the city's leading men in the grandstands, a list of names appeared on certain letters that were passed about in the Senate and later appeared in the wealthiest households of the capital. The lists were said to have been stolen from the emperor's administrators. The capital's rumor mill said it showed those the Concerned One was about to declare offensive to his person. The Senators Pretext and Clement were on the list, as were Einman the chamberlain and Lamb the commander of the City Guardsmen. Marcie Angelica's name was written at the very top. After years of reflection, I have now decided these lists of the damned were forgeries. Before that date the Concerned One had consistently fallen upon those he killed without giving them any warning. No one had ever known him to do any thinking before he acted. Telling people they are soon to die would serve no purpose other than giving them a chance to flee. Agents of Lamb and his master Abdul Selin were, I expect, the true authors of the lists, as no one else would have profited from terrifying the city's wealthy and powerful. In the atmosphere of panic the documents had created, no one questioned their authenticity. Other and still more expansive lists somehow appeared in the city's plazas. Wealthy hostesses made copies and distributed them at dozens of early winter parties along with the candied pigeons and the raw oysters in their shells. By late December, every prominent family thought the emperor was preparing to destroy at least some of its members. Marcie Angelica also had seen her name on the fatal scrolls. In her mind and in the minds of the leading citizens, the only question was what they could do to the emperor before he slaughtered them.
On the last evening of the year, the Concerned One laid himself to sleep on his vast bed in the palace. For the first time in many days, he was feeling healthy and in good spirits. He had trained hard through the past two months. While the rest of the capital lived in constant dread, he was looking forward to the games he would be presiding over on the morrow. On that day, the first day of the new year, he would kill a hundred giant snakes and declare from his elevated seat in the Field of Diversions that the Pan-Polarian people would henceforth be known as “the people of the Expected One.” He awoke after less than an hour of repose. Something was outside the window, perched atop the stone balcony and softly murmuring to him. He drew a gun from beneath his pillows and tiptoed across the floor to have a look. To his horror, as he drew near the arched window, he beheld a large, white owl, a bird of ill omen, slowing turning its head and making demon's chatter. The emperor/god dropped his weapon and ran shouting into the adjoining room, seeking the protection of his chief mistress.
“We have to leave here!” he told her and the giant Norman. “This room is cursed! Get a company of men! I have to sleep at the fighters' school!”
The City Guardsmen accompanied the imperial party to the fighters' school behind the larger arena known as the Field of Diversions. Marcie prepared for the emperor a little cot from the many the combatants rest upon before they fight on the artificial turf. In spite of her efforts to comfort him, the Concerned One remained unable to sleep.
“That owl has joined forces with the wolves!” he told his companions. “All of nature has turned against me!”
He had the soldiers lock himself, Marcie, and Norman in a foul-smelling concrete locker room in which the athletes wait before they are sent outside to fight and perhaps to perish. He asked for a warrior's meal: a thick steak of lion's meat and a bottle of the reddest and sweetest wine available, for he was not too frightened to lose his appetite. The Concerned One devoured the meat the soldiers grilled on a skewer and did not ask why the meat tasted much like beef, for he expected the Guardsmen would do him the small favor of hunting up a lion when their emperor needed a late-night snack. Ample glasses of the sweet wine followed the meal into his stomach. He accepted these from Marcie's hand, as he had done for the many years they had been together. When he had drunk himself into a stupor, she opened a compartment on a ring General Lamb had given her and dropped some poison into the last wine the Concerned One would ever drink. He drained the deadly glass as eagerly as he had the previous ones. A few moments later he put a hand to his forehead and sat on the cot Marcie had prepared for him.
“I think I will take a little nap after all,” he said, and fell over backward, spilling wine across his lap.
Marcie and the giant wrestler waited over him as he snored. She put her ear to his chest, and clearly heard his steady pulse. She looked up at the wrestler with pleading eyes. Without having been asked, he put a pillow over the emperor's face to prevent him from calling out and with his other hand he wrapped a leather strap around the Concerned One's throat and strangled him by slowly twisting the strap tighter. In this sordid way did Luke Anthony, the Concerned One, the last of his line, die: insane, his skin corrupt with open sores, his dreams haunted by ghostly wolves, and his last two friends in the world his executioners. What a great disappointment it must have been to his immortal soul to realize his body was mortal after all! What a greater shock it must have been to him when he discovered his soul was not going to heaven to dwell in the company of Mathias the Glistening and the other gods!
Not knowing what they should do next, Marcie sent for General Lamb, and the commander of the City Guardsmen ordered the body buried beneath the floor of the school; then he sent out the happy news of the emperor's death to every aristocratic home in the city.
At dawn on New Year's Day, everyone was aware the Concerned One was gone. Senator Coppola, one of the men the emperor had supposedly been going to murder, asked and got a resolution from his fellow senators that Luke Anthony's body be exhumed and dragged on a hook through the capital's streets. Not only was this done, the people took turns attacking the corpse with hammers and knives as the City Guardsmen brought it past their doorsteps. He had been their champion while he lived; now that he was gone, the people wanted to be on the winning side far more than they desired to honor their former friend. The city's great men, on the other hand, had gone to bed quaking at the thought of what the emperor might do to them; they awoke unafraid of anything, now that the creature was dead. They gathered on the tall steps at the front of the Senate to proclaim their reborn joy to the equally brave crowds. Never had the air above the floating city of the Aztecs been so bruised with fine words as it was on that New Year's Day. Orator after wellborn orator came forward to hurl insults at the dead man. They made jokes relating to his gilded hair and beard, and mocked his physical condition. “He was more savage than Cepheus,” the speakers said, “more perverse than Darko. As he did to his countless victims, let it be done to him and to his supporters.” The Senate called for the immediate deaths of the late emperor's secret agents, and the City Guardsmen did as they demanded. As many of these agents were unknown, the Guardsmen necessarily had to kill many they only suspected of having been agents in order to get at those who were guilty. On that day of freedom, no one objected to their crude methods.
Patrick Herman Pretext, he of the distinguished profile and the owner of the longest and most silvery of patrician manes, paid the City Guardsmen twelve thousand dollars apiece, and they, out of a new sense of public obligation, made him the new emperor. He put on the purple robes and sent the men and women of Garden City back to their appointed tasks, though in Father's case, that meant he was sent to a new assignment. Pretext began a program of administrative reform designed to return the government to fiscal stability and to reestablish imperial control in the provinces. He freed those Luke Anthony had sent into exile and pardoned those sentenced to death. Everyone who was anyone gave him high marks for his magnanimous behavior on the throne, for his dignified mien at public ceremonies, and for the generous reception he gave to every petitioner. He ruled for three months before General Lamb and the City Guardsmen stabbed him to death while he slept.
Father and those of us in his household meanwhile sailed to the big island of Hawaii and to the Empire's last operative hydrogen gun on the slope of Mauna Kea. In that isolated spot, the metal plague had not yet reached and we could be launched into orbit. The technicians put us asleep, because we would not be able to stand the g-forces while awake; then we were placed into a container that rides suspended above an electromagnetic track for twenty-three miles up the mountain's long slope, gradually accelerating to liftoff speed, when the detachable hydrogen engines turn on and blast us above the Earth's atmosphere. We joined an ore barge in orbit, and rode it to our destination on Mars, where the metal plague had appeared, but would not destroy the mining colony for many months to come.
As was told at the story's beginning, the fool John Chrysalis back in Garden City would give twenty-five thousand dollars apiece to the Guardsmen to become emperor after Pretext was dead. That pretender reigned for the sixty-six days Abdul Selin needed to march from the Missouri; on the sixty-seventh day, the First of June, Selin ordered this would-be ruler hunted down inside the palace and disposed of, but one of Chrysalis's last guards performed this task for Selin before the Turk's men could reach the palace. Within four years of Selin's rise to absolute power in North America, every person named on the fraudulent lists of the Concerned One's victims would suffer the same fate as had befallen John Chrysalis. Even the cunning General Lamb, the giant Norman, Marcie the concubine, and Einman the chamberlain would go in front of a firing squad. There they would learn Selin and his vast family of criminals were not going to share what little was left of the Pan-Polarian Empire with anyone.