It was late that summer when an assassin crept into the Executive Palace and hid himself in the Library Wing, for the purpose of putting a pistol to Julian Conqueror’s head and killing him.
August had just given way to September, and the production of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin was well under way. Julian had not been idle during the preparation of the book and music. All the power of the Presidency and much of the wealth he controlled as a Comstock had been devoted to it. He had renovated a set of unused stables at the West 110th Street end of the Palace grounds, turning them into a “movie studio” as modern as anything in Manhattan; and he had recruited the talents of the city’s finest Production Company, which was called the New York Stage and Screen Alliance. This combination of players, singers, noisemakers, camera-operators, film-copiers, et alia, had been responsible for many well-regarded movies, including Eula’s Choice, previously described. In the past, however, they had always been bound by the rules of the trade and the strictures of the Dominion. In this case Julian had taken charge of them directly; and they were bound to his instructions, and no one else’s.
On this particular day I was down at the “studio” watching some incidental photography not involving the major actors. It was a day off for Magnus Stepney, who was playing Darwin; and Julinda Pique, the screen actress representing Emma Wedgwood, had gone to visit relatives in New Jersey. But the players interested me less than the technical work of the business, which continued without them. I had befriended the Camera Operator In Charge of Illusions, or Effects Shooter, as he was called for short, and I was helping him arrange “shots” for the South American montage in Act Two. He had set up a painting the size of a wall, of jungles and mountains, uncanny in its realism, and he had placed in front of it some very convincing paper imitations of tropical plants and bushes, as well as wildlife in the form of tame dogs dressed as tigers, and a number of armadillos sent by mail from Texas, mainly living. Julian had instructed him not to keep the camera still, but to move it around some, giving a more lively impression; and he was doing so as I watched, trying to keep the restive animals in the frame without inadvertently revealing the artificiality of the backdrop. This was warm work on a sultry September day, and it called forth some unusual curses before he achieved the result he aspired to.
He was just “wrapping up” this business when an Executive Page in green livery came hurrying toward us. The man was obviously agitated, and he had to recover his breath before he could gasp out, “There’s been shooting, Major Hazzard! Shooting at the Palace, sir!”
I rushed there without waiting to hear more. It wasn’t easy getting past the Republican Guards who had cordoned off the Library Wing, and I was alarmed when I saw the court physician hurried in ahead of me. I remonstrated with the Guards until Sam Godwin appeared; then we both proceeded together.
I feared the worst. Julian’s position as President had become increasingly insecure as his battles with the Dominion escalated. Just last week he had declared all Ecclesiastical Writs of Replevin null and void, pending new legislation. This meant that the authorities could no longer claim, seize, or imprison fugitives on complaints issued solely by the Church. It had the effect of releasing Calyxa from her confinement, but it also set free countless jailed apostates, the congregations of various Unaffiliated Churches, a number of Parmentierist radicals who had been scooped up on ecclesiastical charges, and a few of those unfortunate lunatics who insist on proclaiming their personal divinity.
The voiding of that law, added to his ongoing attempt to separate the Church from the Military, amounted to an emasculation of the Dominion. The Dominion could still collect tithes from affiliates, and could pronounce anathema on dissenters, but without legal traction it would soon begin to lose ground—or so Julian hoped.
In response, it seemed they had sent an assassin into our midst: for I did not doubt that the Dominion was behind this treachery. “Is Julian killed?” I asked Sam as we pressed through the crowd in the Library Wing.
“Don’t know,” said Sam. “Has the physician been called for?”
“Yes, I saw him go in—”
But Julian wasn’t killed. Once we attained the Reading Room we found him sitting in a chair, upright and alert, although a bandage had been wrapped around his head. He called us over as soon as he spotted us.
“How badly are you hurt?” Sam demanded.
Julian’s expression was grim. “Not badly, or so the doctor tells me—the bullet took a piece of my ear.”
“How did it happen?”
“The assassin hid behind a chair and came out at me unexpectedly. He would have killed me completely, except that Magnus caught sight of him and called out a warning.”
“I see,” said Sam. “Where is Magnus now?”
“Lying down. The event was alarming for him—he has a sensitive nature.”
“I guess an attempted murder would alarm most anyone. What about the assassin—where’s he?”
“Mauled by the Republican Guards,” said Julian, “and taken into confinement in the basement.”
The “basement” of the Executive Palace included a set of cells in which prisoners could be detained.* “Has he said anything useful?” Sam asked.
“Apparently his tongue was cut out years ago, and he can’t or won’t write. The Dominion chooses its assassins carefully—it knows how to break men, and tries to make its men unbreakable.”
“You don’t know for certain it was the Dominion that sent him.”
“Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-grounded suspicion.”
Sam said nothing to this, but shook his head unhappily; for he believed, and often said, that Julian in his argument with the Dominion had set himself on a course for destruction just as certainly as if he had plunged into the rushing waters above Niagara.
“In any case,” Julian said, “the man’s motivation is plain enough. He was carrying a crudely-printed leaflet demanding the restoration of Deklan Conqueror to the Executive.”
“But if he can’t read or write—”
“I expect the leaflet was a prop, meant to draw suspicion away from the clergy, though who but the clergy would want my murderous uncle back in the Executive seat? Still, I don’t like to have Deklan used as a nail on which assassins pin their hopes. I’ll have to do something about him.”
There was a cold glint in his eye as he said this, and neither Sam nor I dared to pursue the matter, though Julian’s manner filled us with foreboding.
“And there’s the question of the Republican Guards,” Julian continued.
“What about them? It seems as if they acted as soon as the assassin revealed himself.”
“But they ought to have acted before the assassin revealed himself; otherwise what purpose do they serve? It was luck and Magnus Stepney that saved my life, not the Guardsmen. I don’t see how the man could have got this far without a collaborator among them. I inherited those men from the previous regime, and I don’t trust them.”
“Again,” Sam said in a conciliatory tone, “you don’t know—”
“I’m the President, Sam, isn’t that clear to you yet? I’m not required to know; only to act.”
“How do you propose to act, then?”
Julian shrugged. If he wanted advice from us, he didn’t ask for it.
Sam eventually went off to attend to ancillary business, once the atmosphere of crisis began to cool. I stayed to keep Julian company while the doctor removed the temporary bandage in order to dab the wounded ear with iodine and stitch what remained of its ragged edges. The court physician was as smoothly professional as Dr. Linch had been back in Striver, but there would still be a scar when the injury healed. “My head has been pared more often than a pie-apple,” Julian complained. “It gets tiresome, Adam.”
“I’m sure it does. You ought to rest now.”
“Not just yet. I have business to take care of.”
“What business?”
He gave me a look that was almost metallic in its indifference.
“Presidential business,” he said.
No mention was made of the attempted assassination in the city press, for it was a delicate subject; but Julian arranged to make public his response to it, as I discovered the following morning when I left the Palace grounds for a walk down Broadway.
A crowd of pedestrians thronged the street beyond the 59th Street Gate, gazing upward with wide eyes. It was not until I reached the sidewalk outside the great walls that I could see what had attracted all their attention.
High on the iron spikes that surmount the stone wall two Severed Heads had been mounted, one to the left of the Gate and one to the right.
This was as gruesome a sight as anything I had seen in Labrador, more shocking for its presence in an otherwise peaceful city. However, it was not without precedent. The heads of traitors had been displayed here in earlier years and other conflicts, though seldom since the turbulent 2130s. From ground-level it was difficult to discern the identity of the victims, since the heads were contorted by death and had been pecked at by pigeons. But some of the curious onlookers had fetched opera-glasses in order to satisfy their curiosity, and a consensus had emerged among the crowd. The head on the left was not familiar to anyone present (nor could have been, for it belonged to the assassin captured in the Library Wing). The head on the right, however, was the one that had recently rested on the shoulders of Deklan Conqueror, the former President, who had once feared his nephew as a usurper, and had nothing to fear now but the judgment of a righteous God.
The unpleasant trophies remained there most of a week, rotting. Small boys gathered every day to toss pebbles at them, until the ghastly ornaments at last came loose from their spikes and tumbled back onto the Palace grounds.
Julian wouldn’t speak of the beheadings, saying only that justice had been done and that the event was finished. I hoped he had not ordered the executions, but had only sanctioned them—though that was bad enough. I did not, of course, feel any sympathy for Julian’s uncle or the anonymous assassin, since the former had committed many murders and the latter had attempted at least one. But the cutting off of their heads without benefit of trial did not seem to me entirely civilized; and I could not help thinking that the public display of their remains served no better purpose than to make Julian appear brutal and imperious.
During that same week, in another imperious act, Julian dismissed every serving member of the Republican Guard—some five hundred altogether—and replaced them with members of the Army of the Laurentians, selected by Julian personally from a list of those who had fought by his side at Mascouche, Chicoutimi, and Goose Bay. Many of these men were my comrades as well, and it was startling to walk down the halls of the Executive Palace and find myself greeted not with the malign stares and suspicion to which I had become accustomed, but by hearty hails from old friends and acquaintances.
That feeling was compounded one Friday evening when I went to join Julian and Magnus Stepney to plan out the next week’s efforts on Charles Darwin. The new Captain of the Republican Guards, whom I had not met, was standing watch over the Library Wing when I turned a corner in one of that building’s long halls and nearly collided with him.
“Watch out,” the new man cried, “I’m not a door you can swing wide and walk through—state your business, mister—but—be damned if it isn’t Adam Hazzard! Adam, you bookworm! I’ll shake your hand or know why not!”
He did shake my hand, and it was a bruising experience, for the new Captain of the Guard was Mr. Lymon Pugh.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so glad to see him, but at that moment he seemed like an envoy from a simpler and easier world. I told him I hadn’t expected to meet him again, and that I hoped the Palace was a good place in which to find himself employed.
“Better than a slaughterhouse,” he said. “And you! Last time I saw you, Adam, you had just married that tavern singer from the Thirsty Boot.”
“I did, and we have a daughter now—I’ll introduce you!”
“You wrote a book, too, somebody told me.”
“A pamphlet about ‘Captain Commongold,’ and a novel which is selling adequately well; and I’ve met Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, and worked beside him. But you must have accomplished things just as significant!”
He shrugged. “I lived to my present age without dying,” he said. “That’s enough to boast about, by my lights.”
Calyxa kept her distance from The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, as well as from Julian himself. Having supplied the score and lyrics, she felt no need to involve herself in the minutiae of movie-making, especially during a time when she was instructing Flaxie in the fundamentals of eating, and standing upright, and such useful skills as that.
She continued to meet with Parmentierist friends from the city, however, and Mrs. Comstock (or Mrs. Godwin, as I could not get accustomed to calling her) pursued certain of her contacts among the lesser Eupatridians. More importantly, the two women consulted one another and formulated plans to deal with any crisis that might arise out of Julian’s political situation.
“Do you know very much about Mediterranean France?” Calyxa asked me with a certain affected casualness, one September night as we lay in bed.
“Only that Mitteleuropa claims it as a Territory, while it insists it’s an Independent Republic.”
“The weather there is very clement, and Mediterranean France has cordial relations with other parts of the world.”
“I expect that’s so … what about it?”
“Nothing at all, except that we may have to live there one day.”
I didn’t dismiss her assertion out of hand. In fact we had discussed the possibility several times before. In the event of a disaster, such as the collapse of Julian’s presidency and the ascension to the Executive of hostile agencies, all of us (including Julian) might need to flee the country.
But I fervently hoped those conditions would not arise; or, if they did, that it would happen far in the future, when Flaxie was older and better able to travel. I didn’t like to think of taking an infant on a trans-Atlantic journey. I was not even willing to let Flaxie be taken for rides in the streets of Manhattan, especially not now, with a new Pox circulating and half the citizens going about with paper masks over their noses.
“You can’t leave these arrangements to the last hour,” Calyxa said. “Things need to be set up in advance. We decided on Mediterranean France—”
“Wait—who decided?”
“Emily and I, between us. I consulted the local Parmentierists, and they say it’s an ideal refuge. Emily has connections with people in the shipping business—right now she would have no trouble arranging passage for us, though that might change, with a changing situation.”
“I still hope to spend my life in America and write books,” I said.
“You wouldn’t be the only American author in Marseilles. You can send manuscripts by mail.”
“I’m not sure my publisher would agree to that.”
“If things get much worse in Manhattan, Adam, you may not have a publisher.”
Perhaps that observation was true. But it didn’t cheer me up, or help me sleep.
All the filming of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin was finished by Thanksgiving of 2175. That wasn’t the end of it, of course. What had been captured on film was only the visual portion of the show; to be presented in a theater it still needed voice-actors, noise-makers, intensive rehearsals, and a suitable venue. But a large part of the hardest work was done, especially for the technicians and screen-actors, and Julian thought it would be appropriate to commemorate the moment by hosting what he called a “wrap party.”
The grounds of the Executive Palace had not been a social magnet during Julian’s reign, especially so after the unannounced beheadings. Julian was not discomfited by this, since he didn’t much care for the companionship of high Eupatridians, including even members of the Senate. Although the Senate had been generous toward his regime in the beginning, there had been friction with that branch of the government as well as with the Dominion. Julian did not enact any radical labor legislation,* but he had refused to dispatch troops during the servile insurrection in the thread trades.† His implied sympathy for the rebels enraged those Senators who had connections with the trade, and strongly-worded protests had been issued from that body.
So we did not have friendly Eupatridians to invite to our Wrap Party; but that wasn’t a drawback, in Julian’s opinion. Increasingly Julian had chosen to surround himself with a crowd of Aesthetes and Philosophers—not just the movie crew, but a motley assortment of well-born radicals, religious reformers, musicians, Parmentierist tract-writers, artists with more ambition than income, and people of that stripe.
The party took place on the last warm evening of the year. The temperature was nearly tropical, though Thanksgiving was almost on us, and after dark the celebration spilled out onto the great lawn of the Executive Palace. The efficiency of the New York City Hydroelectric Dynamo had lately been improved, and Julian had extended the hours of the Illumination of Manhattan, so that the cumulative light shed by the city’s electric lamps gave the clouds overhead an eerie glow. The Pond and the Hunting Grounds were wrapped in shadow and looked very mysterious and romantic, and the guests and film crew were soon giddy with champagne. They strolled or capered about on the lawn, or shared hempen cigarettes in secluded places, and as the evening wore on their behavior became more flagrant and less discreet.
I sat on the marble steps of the Palace watching the revelry from a safe distance. After a time Pastor Magnus Stepney came and joined me. “It’s a cheerful event, Adam,” he said, settling his lanky frame onto the step just to the left of me.
“It’s a spectacle, anyhow,” I said.
“Don’t you like to see people enjoy themselves?”
That was a subtler question than he seemed to realize. I had come to be friendly with many of these revelers, especially the crew who had worked on the filming of Charles Darwin, and I knew them to be good-souled and well-intentioned people, for the most part. But the event was beginning to surpass anything I would have recognized as civilized celebration back in Williams Ford. Men and women not related by marriage were dancing to lewd songs, or chasing one another amidst gales of laughter, or indulging in intimate caresses regardless of the observation of those around them. Some of the crew were so intoxicated that they began to press such intimacies even on members of their own sex; and often enough these attentions were willingly received.*
“Well,” I said, “that depends. I don’t disapprove of anybody having a good time. And I don’t like to set myself up in judgment. But what about you, Magnus? You being a church pastor and all, even if your church is an eccentric one. Is this how you encourage your congregation to behave?”
“My only God is Conscience, Adam. I put that statement up on a sign, to warn the unwary.”
“Your conscience is happy to sit here and watch your friends debauch by moonlight?”
“The moon’s not up quite yet.”
“That’s a dodge, Pastor.”
“You misunderstand my doctrine. Perhaps I can give you a pamphlet. I encourage people to obey their conscience, and follow the Golden Rule, and so forth. But Conscience isn’t the mean-spirited overseer so many people seem to think it is. Genuine Conscience speaks to all people in all tongues, and it can do so because it has just a few simple things to say. ‘Love your neighbor as your brother,’ and do all that that entails—visit the sick, refrain from beating wives and children, don’t murder people for profit, etc. You know how I think of Conscience, Adam? I think of Conscience as a great green God—literally green, the color of spring leaves. With a garland of laurels, perhaps, or some leafy underwear, as in the Greek paintings. He says: Trust one another, even if you aren’t trusted. He says: Do as I tell you, and you’ll be back in Eden in no time. Do you know anything about Game Theory, Adam Hazzard?”
I said I did not. Magnus Stepney explained that it was an obscure Science of the Secular Ancients, and that it dealt with the mathematics of bargains, and mutually beneficial exchanges, and such matters. “Basically, Adam, Game Theory suggests that there are two ways for human beings to operate. You can be trustworthy and trust others, or you can be untrustworthy to your own advantage. The trustworthy man makes a deal and keeps it; the untrustworthy man makes the same deal but absconds with the cash. Conscience tells us, ‘Be the trustworthy man.’ That’s a tall order, for the trustworthy man is often cheated and exploited; while the untrustworthy man often occupies thrones and pulpits, and revels in his riches. But the untrustworthy man, if we all emulated him, would hasten us into an eternal Hell of mutual predation; while the trustworthy man, if his behavior became general, would throw open the gates of Heaven. That’s what Heaven is, Adam, if it’s anything at all—a place where you can trust others without hesitation, and they can trust you.”
I asked Pastor Stepney if he had been drinking. He said he had not.
“Well,” I said, “is this a sample of Paradise, then—this raucous party?”
“Conscience isn’t a brutal taskmaster. Conscience has no argument with kisses in the dark, if they’re freely given and freely received. Conscience offers no cavils to our taste in music, clothing, literature, or amative behavior. It smiles on intimacy and banishes hatred. It doesn’t scourge the reckless lover.”
That was an interesting doctrine, and it seemed sensible, if heretical.
“So, then, yes,” he said, waving his hand at the champagne-and hemp-fueled festivities proceeding about us, “you can think of all this as a rehearsal for Paradise.”
I meant to ask him what Conscience in his leafy underwear might have to say about Julian’s conflict with the Dominion, or the posting of severed heads on iron spikes. But Pastor Stepney rose and went off to pursue his own unspecified pleasures before I could pose the question. So I took his advice, and tried to look at the revelries unfolding before me as if they were a foretaste of that Reward to which we all aspire; and I had some success at this effort, until a drunken camera-man stumbling up the Palace stairs paused and vomited at my feet, which diminished the illusion considerably.
Conspicuous by his absence from these revels was Julian himself. He had appeared briefly at the opening of the Wrap Party, waving at us from one of the indoor balconies where his murderous uncle used to address Independence Day gatherings—but he had absented himself shortly thereafter, and I hadn’t seen him since. That was not unusual, for his moods were mercurial, and he was increasingly inclined to brood alone in the Library Wing or in some other part of the labyrinthine Executive Palace. In truth I didn’t give it much thought, until Lymon Pugh came down the marble stairs, sparing a disgusted glance for the gamboling Aesthetes, and said I ought to come see to Julian.
“Why, where is he?”
“In the Throne Room with Sam Godwin. They’ve been shouting at each other for most of an hour, ferociously. You might need to interfere, if it comes to blows—if you can walk straight.”
“I’m completely sober.”
“That makes one of you, then.”
“Do you find this shocking, Lymon?”
He shrugged. “I’ve seen drunker parties. Though where I come from they usually end in a murder or a mass arrest.”
I followed him to the Executive Office, which Lymon and other members of the Republican Guard called the Throne Room. Perhaps they can be pardoned for the exaggeration. The Executive Office was a vast square tiled room at the very heart of the Palace, windowless but forever ablaze with electric lamps. Its high ceiling was painted with a panoramic picture of Otis* on his gunboat fighting the Battle of the Potomac long ago. This was the room in which Presidents signed their Proclamations, or met with foreign consuls or Senatorial delegations on formal occasions. As such, it was set up to emphasize the dignity and power of the Presidency. The Presidential Chair wasn’t quite a “throne,” but approached that description as closely (or more closely) than any respectable republican chair really ought to have: it was carved from the heart of some noble oak, upholstered in purple cloth and plastered with gold leaf, and raised on a marble dais. Just now Julian sat sidelong on it, while Sam paced before him in short angry strides.
“All yours,” Lymon Pugh whispered, ducking out of the room before I could announce myself. Neither Sam nor Julian took any notice of my presence, for they were too busy arguing. Their voices echoed from the ornamental tile floor and bounced back from the high ceiling.
I didn’t like to see the unhappiness so obviously written on Julian’s face, nor was it pleasant to hear Sam berating him. The argument concerned some decision Julian had given out without Sam’s knowledge or approval.
“Do you have any conception,” Sam was asking, “of what you’ve done—of what the consequences of this will be?”
“The consequence I’m hoping for,” said Julian, “is the extinction of an old and ugly tyranny.”
“What you’ll get is a civil war!”
“The Dominion is a noose around the neck of the nation, and I mean to cut the rope.”
“A noose is what you’re staring at, if you don’t desist! You act as if you can proclaim any doctrine you like, and enforce it with soldiers—”
“Can’t I? Isn’t that exactly what my uncle did?”
“And where is your uncle now?”
Julian looked away.
“The enemies of a President hold daggers in their hands,” Sam went on. “The more enemies, the more daggers. You offended the Dominion—well, that can’t be undone. You’ve defied the Senate, which doubles your danger. And if these orders reach the Army of the Californias—”
“The orders have been dispatched. They can’t be withdrawn.”
“You mean you won’t withdraw them!”
“No,” Julian said, in a softer but no less hostile tone. “No, I won’t.”
There were smaller chairs arrayed before the Throne, presumably for lesser dignitaries to sit in. Sam kicked one of these chairs with his foot and sent it screeching across the tiled floor. “I will not let you commit suicide!”
“You’ll do as you’re told, and be quiet about it! The fact that you married my mother doesn’t make you my master! I had but one father, and he was killed by Deklan Conqueror.”
“If I protected you all these years, Julian, it was out of my loyalty to your father, and my affection for you, and for no other reason! I don’t have any ambition to sit on a throne, or meddle with the man who does so!”
“But you didn’t protect me, Sam, and you do meddle! By all rights I should have died in the Goose Bay Campaign! Everything that’s happened since then is just a ridiculously prolonged last gasp—can’t you see that?”
“That’s not the sort of thing your father would ever have said, or allowed you to say.”
“Your debt to my father is your own business. Mine was paid in full, with Deklan’s head.”
“You can’t salve your conscience with an execution! Bryce Comstock would tell you the same thing, if he was here.”
Julian had ceased shouting, but his anger had not abated. It had run underground, instead, and glittered in his eyes like a rushing torrent glimpsed through the crevice of a glacier. “Thank you for your advice. But there’s nothing more to discuss. You’re dismissed.”
Sam looked as if he might kick over another chair. But he didn’t. His shoulders slumped, and he turned to the door, defeated.
“Talk to him if you can,” he whispered to me on his way out. “I can’t.”
“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” Julian said as Sam’s footsteps faded down the corridor.
I advanced to the foot of the Throne. “Lymon Pugh tipped me off. He was afraid it might come to blows.”
“Not quite.”
“What did you do, Julian, that offended Sam so much?”
“Declared a sort of war, in his view.”
“Haven’t you had enough of war yet?”
“It’s nothing to do with the Dutch. There’s been a rebellion in Colorado Springs. Yesterday the Council of the Dominion told their parish Deacons to disobey any Presidential mandate that conflicts with ecclesiastical regulations.”
“Is that what you call a rebellion? It sounds more like a lawyer’s brief.”
“It amounts to an expressed wish to overthrow me!”
“And I suppose you can’t tolerate that.”
“Tonight I declared the City of Colorado Springs a treasonous territory, and I ordered the Army of the Californias to capture it and establish military law.”
“A whole Army to occupy one city?”
“An Army and more, if that’s what it takes to overthrow the Council and burn the Dominion Academy to the ground. Traitorous Deacons, should any survive, can be tried in court for their crimes.”
“Colorado Springs is an American city, Julian. The Army might not like to raze it.”
“The Army has many opinions, but only one Commander in Chief.”
“Won’t innocent civilians get killed in the fighting, though?”
“What fight ever spared the innocent?” Julian scowled and glared. “Do you think I can sit in this chair and not imagine blood, Adam Hazzard? Blood, yes; blood, granted! Blood on all sides! Blood past, present, and future! I didn’t ask for this job, but I don’t deceive myself about the nature of it.”
“Well,” I said, not wanting to provoke him into another outburst, “I expect it’ll work out all right in the end, if you say so.”
He stared at me as if I had contradicted him. “There are rules about entering this room—do you know that, Adam? I don’t suppose you do. Visitors customarily bow when they cross the threshold. Senators bow, ambassadors from distant nations bow, even the clergy is obliged to bow. The rule doesn’t exempt Athabaska lease-boys, to my knowledge.”
“No? Well, it’s a fine room, but I’m not sure it requires any genuflection on my part. I didn’t bow down to you when we were shooting squirrels by the River Pine, and I don’t think I could get in the habit of doing it now. I’ll leave, if you like.”
Perhaps I sounded sharp. Julian’s face was immobile for a long moment. Then his expression changed yet again.
Incredibly, he smiled. He looked, for a moment, years younger. “Adam, Adam … I would be more insulted if you bowed than if you didn’t. You’re right, and I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“No offense given or taken, in that case.”
“I’m tired, and I’m tired of quarreling.”
“You ought to go to bed, then.”
“No—it wouldn’t work. It’s been days since I was able to sleep. But at least we can put Colorado Springs out of our minds. Would you like to see something unusual, Adam? Something from the days of the Secular Ancients?”
“I suppose so … if you want to show it to me.”
If anything had lately alarmed me about Julian’s behavior it was the way his moods and whims darted about as unpredictably as minnows in a fish-pool. The tendency had first become obvious when he was producing The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. He would appear on the set unannounced, and stalk around like an Oriental tyrant, demanding petty changes to the scenery or harassing the actors. Then the intemperance would pass from his mind as quickly as a cloud shadow crosses a prairie meadow, and he would smile sheepishly and offer apologies and praise. “Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”
I wished he wouldn’t wear the crown at all; for it plagued him, and made him imperious, and confused his mind.
He came down from his high chair and put his arm across my shoulder. “A fresh discovery from the Dominion Archives. Do you remember when I told you there were ancient Movies hidden there?”
“Yes—but not in any form we could see, you said.”
“And I said I would assign a Technician to work on the problem. Well, there’s been some success in the project. Come downstairs, Adam, and I’ll a show you a Movie that hasn’t been seen for two hundred years—part of one, at least.”
It turned out Julian had established a Cinema Room in the lower section of the Palace, useful for work on Darwin as well as the restoration of ancient moving pictures. I didn’t like to go into the basement of the Palace, as a rule, for it was a cold place even in warm weather, and I had heard of the prison cells and interrogation chambers located there. But the Cinema Room was a new installation, wholly modern and tolerably warm. Unusual machines and chemical baths had been installed there, along with a pristine white Movie Screen at one end and an elaborate Mechanical Projector at the other.
“Most of the films we found were crudely stored and eroded beyond repair,” said Julian. “Even the best of them were only partially recoverable, but what a treasure nonetheless,” and I heard in his voice an echo of the Julian Comstock who had pawed through books in the Tip outside Williams Ford with just such rapt fascination. “Lately I like to come down here at night, when it’s still and quiet, and watch these fragments. Here,” he said, picking up a can the size of a pie-plate, “this is a film called On the Beach, from the twentieth century—about half an hour of it. The original was longer, of course, and had recorded sound and such refinements.”
I took a chair as he threaded the ancient Movie, which had been copied onto modern celluloid, into the projecting machine. Midnight had come and gone, and Calyxa would be expecting me home, but I sensed that Julian needed my company just now; and I was afraid that if I left him he might fall into a deeper funk, or declare yet another war. “What’s it about?”
The projector, driven by the Palace’s unsleeping electrical generators, hummed and clattered to life. “Boats and things. You’ll see.” He dimmed the lights.
I confess that I didn’t understand most of what played out on the screen before me. It was riddled with gaps and lacunae. Many of the scenes were terribly faded, almost ghostly. Our inability to reproduce recorded sound interfered with the intelligibility of the film, since much of it consisted of people talking to one another. But there were many striking and unusual things in it.
There was an Underwater Boat, for instance, which Julian said was called a Submarine Boat. The interior of it looked like the engine room of a modern steamer, but more complex, decorated with countless clocks, levers, pipes, buttons, blinking lights, etc.; and the ship’s crew wore uniforms that were perpetually clean and starched.
But only a few of the scenes were nautical. Some took place in a city of the Secular Ancients. There were automobiles in the streets, at least in the earlier portion of the film, though not as many as I might have expected, and then none at all. The people of the city behaved in ways that suggested great wealth but even greater eccentricity.
There was also, as the title suggested, a beach scene, in which men and women socialized in clothing so abbreviated as to approach blatant nudity. A glimpse of this, I thought to myself, would have confirmed Deacon Hollingshead in all his prejudices about our ancestors.
Inexplicable events happened. There was an automobile race, with casualties. The city was evacuated, and a newspaper blew down an empty street.* Julian paid close attention to the fragmentary film, though he had watched it many times before; but it seemed very sad and elegiac to me, and I wondered if Julian’s repeated viewing of it had not further depressed his mood.
It ended abruptly. Julian shook his head like a man recovering from a trance, and stopped the projector and turned up the lights. “Well?”
“I don’t know what to say, Julian. I wish there had been more scenes of that underwater boat in operation. I suppose it’s a good movie. I’m surprised the people in it seemed so unhappy, though, since they lived in a world full of automobiles and submarine boats.”
“It’s a drama—people in dramas are seldom happy.”
“It didn’t end with a wedding, or any uplifting thing such as that.”
“Well, it’s incomplete. We don’t know what the whole of it was like.”
“Certainly it’s a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don’t seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.”
“I don’t deny that they were imperfect,” Julian said in a distant voice. “I’m not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them.”
“What sin is that?”
“They evolved into us,” he said.
Clearly it was past time for me to go home. The sun would be up before very many more hours passed. I told Julian he ought to try to sleep, and see if the Presidency wasn’t more tolerable to a rested mind.
“I will,” he said, unconvincingly. “But before you go, Adam, I want to ask a favor of you.”
“Anything, if I’m able to grant it.”
“My mother has been making plans for all of us to leave the country. I’ve told her repeatedly we won’t be forced into such a drastic retreat. But I may be wrong. It’s true that I’ve made enemies. I’ve gambled with History, and I can’t guarantee the result. Adam, do you see those three film canisters on the table by the door?”
“Hard to miss them. What are they, some fresh discovery from the Archives?”
“No. That’s The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. All three acts, a master print of it, plus the performance script. Perhaps it’s childish, but I don’t like to think of it being permanently destroyed. If the political situation gets worse, or if anything unpleasant happens to me, I want you to take Darwin out of the country with you.”
“Of course I will!—I give you my word—but you’ll come to Mediterranean France along with us, if the necessity arises, and you can bring the canisters yourself.”
“Yes, Adam; but it would please me to know I’m not the only one thinking of it. I put all the best part of myself into that film. It deserves to be seen.”
“All Manhattan will see it. The debut is only a few weeks away.”
“Of course. But you promise to do as I ask?”
It was an easy guarantee to make. I gave him my hand on it. Then I left the room, without bowing.
As I walked off, I heard the projector start up again.
The enclosed grounds of the Palace make up a rectangle two and a half miles long by half a mile wide, carved out of Manhattan by a man named Olmsted in ancient times. Pleasant and rustic by day, in the small hours of the night it was a lonely place. It hosted a large permanent population of bureaucrats, servants, and Republican Guards; but the majority of them had been asleep since midnight. Now even the revelries of the Wrap Party had ceased. Little evidence remained of what had taken place earlier in the evening, apart from a pair of Aesthetes snoring in wicker chairs along the Palace’s great piazza.
Not every member of the Republican Guard was allowed to sleep, however. They kept the watch in shifts, like sailors. They manned the four great Gates at all times, and patrolled the high walls for intruders. Lymon Pugh was one of them, and he met me as I was leaving the Palace. “On duty still?” I asked him.
“Just coming off it. Felt like walking a little before going to bed, the night air being so warm.”
The moon was up. A mist rose from the nearby Pond and put its pale fingers into the ailanthus groves edging the lawn. “This weather seems strange to me,” I said. “In Athabaska we often had snow by Thanksgiving. And in Labrador, too, of course. Not here, though … not this year.”
“Let me walk a little way with you, Adam. I have no other business, and I doubt I could sleep, to be honest.”
“Sleep is an elusive quarry some nights,” I agreed. “Do you enjoy doing this work for Julian?”
“I guess I don’t mind it. It was kind of him to select me, and there’s no heavy lifting involved. I don’t expect it to last, though. No offense to Julian Commongold—Comstock, I mean—but I’m not sure he’s altogether suited to the Presidency.”
“Why do you say so?”
“From what I’ve seen, it’s one of those jobs like being a line overseer at a packing factory—it rewards ruthlessness, and it kills whatever goodness a man might have in him. I knew a Seattle man who was hired up to be a line overseer at the factory where I worked. A generous man, saintly to his children, well-liked all around; but they made him a line boss, and after a week in that job I heard him threaten to cut a man’s throat for slowness. He meant it, too. Began to carry a razor in his hip pocket. Flaunted it from time to time.”
“That’s how you see Julian?”
“It’s not that he’s bad by nature. He isn’t. That’s just the problem. A truly bad man would have an easier time as President, and probably make a greater success of it.”
“Must a President be bad, then?”
“It seems so to me. But I don’t know much history—maybe it hasn’t always been that way.” We walked a little farther, listening to the soft sound our shoes made on the gravel path. “My point, though,” Lymon Pugh said, “is that Julian’s not succeeding in the Presidency, whatever the reason for it. I know you and your family are planning your get-away—”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me anything, but I hear things. I don’t repeat what I hear, if that’s on your mind.”
“No—what you say is true. I hope it isn’t necessary to flee the country. But it never hurts to know where the back door is. Come with us, Lymon, if the worst happens, God forbid. Calyxa has good things to say about Mediterranean France.”
“Thank you for asking, Adam. That’s very flattering to me. But I wouldn’t know what to do in a foreign country. I don’t know France from Canaan. If it comes to that I mean to steal a horse and head west, maybe as far as the Willamette Valley.”
We came to the guest-house where Calyxa and Flaxie and I had made our temporary home. I felt unaccountably sad; but I didn’t want Lymon Pugh to see that emotion, or hear it in my voice, so I did not speak.
“You have a fine family, Adam Hazzard,” he said. “You make sure nothing unpleasant happens to them. That’s your task, if you don’t mind taking advice from a plain Republican Guardsman. And now I’m off to bed.” He turned away. “Goodnight!”
“Goodnight,” I managed.
I paused at the door as Lymon Pugh headed back toward the Palace.
The night had that unusual calm which marks the hour before the dawn, “silence brooding like a gentle spirit / O’er all the still and pulseless world.” Off in the darkness I saw a huge silhouette lumbering among the trees—that was Otis, who seemed well on the way to becoming a nocturnal Giraffe. Perhaps he especially enjoyed the lonely hours of the morning. Or perhaps he couldn’t sleep any better than the rest of us.
I looked into the darkness for a good long while. Then I went indoors, and crept into bed with Calyxa just as the sky was lightening, and curled into the warmth of her sleeping body.
* The cells were installed during the reign of the very first Comstock, and had been used by every Comstock since, including Julian: Julian’s uncle Deklan, since his deposition, had been languishing in that same internal prison.
* Much to Calyxa’s disappointment and disgust.
† In July of 2175 a rebellion among indentured laborers at an Ohio broad-silk mill had spread to neighboring ribbon factories and dye shops. Over one hundred men died in the resulting siege.
* To be fair, many of these same individuals defied expectations in matters of Masculine and Feminine Deportment even when fully sober. It’s a common failing among theater people, I have found.
* The former President, not the Giraffe which was named after him.
* I asked Julian whether this was about the False Tribulation, but Julian said no; On the Beach had been produced nearly a century before the End of Oil. The events it dramatized must have been purely local in nature, or purely imaginary.