Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (35 page)

"Thank you, Julian, but why wait? I might miss an opportunity."

"Or undertake an engagement you won't be able to keep. Adam ... perhaps my mother wasn't sufficiently explicit about Deklan Comstock's invitation. When she said
we
 were invited to the Executive Palace, the pronoun included
you
."

"What!"

"And Calyxa as well."

I was appalled, and not a little weak about the knees. "How's that possible?

What does the President want with me? For that matter, how could he know anything about me at all?"

"The President's men no doubt bribe or threaten the house hold servants.

Walls are transparent to them. Your name and Calyxa's were explicitly mentioned in the invitation."

"Julian, I'm just a lease-boy—I don't know how to behave in the company of a President, much less a murderous one!"

"Probably he won't have you killed. But he must have learned that you were the true chronicler of my so-called 'adventures,' and I suppose he wants to have a look at you. As for your behavior—" He shrugged. "Be yourself. You have nothing to gain by posing, and nothing to lose by revealing your origins.

If the President wants to mock me for associating with lease-boys and tavern singers, let him do so."

This was not a pleasing prospect; but I bit my lip and said nothing.

"Meanwhile," Julian said, "I owe you a favor."

"Surely you don't."

"I do, though. You befriended me in Williams Ford, and showed me all you knew about that Estate and how to hunt it."

"And you've shown me Edenvale."

"Edenvale is nothing.
Manhattan,
 Adam! My town is Manhattan, and I want to instruct you in the perils and the pleasures of it, before you begin life as a working man."

Perhaps this was meant as a distraction, but I was willing to abandon myself to it, considering how perilous our existence seemed to have become.

"Maybe I can learn some of the ways of the Aristos before I'm thrust into their company at the Presidential Palace."

"That's right. And the first lesson is not to use the word 'Aristos.' "

"
Aristocrats,
 then."

"Nor even that. Among ourselves, we're 'the Eupatridian Community.' "

A label big enough to strangle a man, I thought; but I practiced it dutifully, and after a while it ceased to stick in the throat.

The reader, if not versed in recent history, may be anxious to discover whether or not Julian and I were killed on Independence Day. I do not mean to protract the answer to that important question, but the events of the Fourth will make more sense once I have described some of what happened prior to that date.

It was a ner vous time for Calyxa and me, though we were newlyweds and tempted to believe in our own immortality. President Comstock was hardly concerned with us, Calyxa said, and in any event we were not locked up in the fine rooms of the Aristocracy. We could pack up our belongings at any time, and travel to Boston or Buffalo, and live there anonymously, beyond the reach of any maddened Chief Executive. I would write books under an assumed name (in this scenario), and Calyxa would sing in respectable cafés. We went so far as to price railway tickets and scrutinize timetables, though I was distressed at the prospect of abandoning Julian to his fate.

"It's his own fate," Calyxa said, "and he could shed himself of it if he chose to. He ran away once—can't he run away again? Ask him to come with us."

But when I proposed this option to Julian he shook his head. "No, Adam.

That's no longer possible. It was a miracle that I escaped from Williams Ford.

Here, I'm under much closer scrutiny."

"What scrutiny? I don't see it. New York City is a big locality—big enough to get lost in, it seems to me."

"My uncle has eyes everywhere. If I so much as packed a bag he'd hear of it. This house is watched, though very discreetly. If I go for a walk, the President's men aren't far behind. If I drink to excess in some Broadway tavern, a report will find its way to Deklan Conqueror."

"And are Calyxa and I also under this observation?"

"Probably, but the surveillance isn't so strict." He cast a glance to make sure no servant could overhear us. "If you want to escape, you're well advised to do so. I won't stop you or blame you. But it must be a
clean
 escape, or else the President's men will haul you back and use you against me. To be honest, given your trivial position in Deklan's eyes, you might be safer here than elsewhere. But the decision is yours, of course." He added, "I'm sorry you find yourself mixed up in it, Adam. I never meant for it to be so, and I'll do anything I can to help."

So Calyxa and I went on studying our railroad timetables, and made airy plans, but failed to pursue them. We continued living in the brownstone house as the days and weeks passed. Mrs. Comstock kept on with her charitable work, and held occasional gatherings of the Manhattan artistic circle, events which Julian enjoyed very much. Sam was often absent during this time, pursuing contacts in the upper echelons of the military—for he was no longer "Sam Samson" but Sam Godwin once again, restored to his reputation as a veteran of the Isthmian War; and I imagined he was performing his own kind of intelligence-gathering, with the aim of discovering the President's ultimate intentions.

There was no such useful work for me, but I spent many pleasant hours with Calyxa as we adjusted to wedded life. Calyxa in her own way was as philosophically-inclined as Julian, and liked to discuss the flaws and short-coming of the system of Aristocracy, of which she disapproved. When that palled, we took walks around the city.
She enjoyed exploring the shops and restaurants on Broadway or Fifth Avenue; and on fine days we ventured as far as the great stone walls of the Presidential Palace Grounds.
⁵¹
The walls were im mensely tall and thick, and made of granite fragments salvaged from city ruins. The huge Broadway Gate at 59th Street, with its stone and steel guard-house, was a work of architecture nearly as impressive as the Montreal Cathedral where I had first spied Calyxa in her surplice, and twice as monolithic. I couldn't imagine what lay within those moated and forbidding walls (though I was destined to find out).

The month of June was unusually fine and sunny, and we took such walks often. To avoid monotony we varied our route; and we were returning from Broadway by way of Hudson Street when we passed a Manhattan book-store.

The sunlight fell aslant through the window glass, revealing the illustrated cover of a book by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton—a volume I hadn't seen before, called
American Sailors Afloat.

Needless to say, I hurried inside.

I had never been in a book-store before. All the books I had read had been borrowed from the Estate library at Williams Ford, or (in the case of
A Historyof Mankind in Space
) dug moldering from ancient Tips. Of course I had known such stores existed, and that Manhattan must include more than a few of them.

But I had not gathered up the courage to seek one out. I suppose I had imagined a book-store to be an intimidating place, as airy and marble-pillared as a Greek temple. This store was not such a sacral establishment. Grogan's Books Music and Cheap Publications was the name of it, and it was no more or less grand than the shoe store to the left of it or the vaccination shop to the right.

Even the smell of the air inside the shop was inviting, a perfume of paper and ink. The books on sale were many and various, and all unfamiliar to me; but I made my way by some instinct to the section where Mr. Easton's novels were on display—a great plethora of them, fresh and bright in their stamped and colored boards.

"Close your mouth," Calyxa said, "or you'll begin to drool."

"This must be near everything Mr. Easton has published!"

"I hope it is. He seems to have written far too many books already."

I had been hoarding my back pay from the Army of the Laurentians, grudging every expense—the hope of one day owning a typewriter was still at the back of my mind—but I could not resist buying a volume or two
⁵²
of Mr.

Easton's recent work. Calyxa browsed among the sheet music while I counted out Comstock dollars to the cashier.

When we left the store Calyxa lingered a few moments in front of the vaccination shop next door. Calyxa, for all her contempt of the Aristocracy, was not immune to certain aspects of Manhattan fashion. The window of the vaccination shop advertised a newly-arrived Yellow Fever serum, pop u lar with the sort of stylish young city women who sport vaccination scars as if they were jewelry. A single dose of this serum cost more than a dozen novels, however; and Julian had already warned us against such shops, which tended to dispense more diseases than they ever prevented.

In any case my attention was absorbed by the prospect of new Easton books to read. I confessed to Calyxa, as we walked home, how inspiring Mr.

Easton's work had been to me, and how it had formed my ambition to become a professional writer, and how distant that prospect now seemed.

"Nonsense," Calyxa said. "Adam, you
are
 a professional writer."

"Not professional—not even published."

"You've written a pop u lar pamphlet already.
The Adventures of CaptainCommongold
 was on sale in Grogan's, if you didn't notice. Selling briskly, it appeared to me."

"That abomination! The piece that imperiled Julian's life. Horribly man-gled by Theodore Dornwood, on top of it all. He murdered half my commas, and misplaced the rest."

"Punctuation aside, it's your work, and professional enough that a surprising number of literate Manhattanites are willing to part with a dollar and fifty cents to read it."

That was true, though I had not thought of it in such a light. My indignation at Mr. Dornwood was rekindled. I escorted Calyxa to the brownstone house of Mrs. Comstock, and said no more about the question, though I privately determined to visit the offices of the
Spark
 and express my grievances there.

I would have preferred to spend that evening reading, for the books I had bought were a novelty to me, and I could not help admiring the crisp pages and unsmudged letters of the freshly-purchased volumes, and the clean white string that bound the signatures snugly together; but Julian insisted on taking Calyxa and me to see a movie—an invitation that was difficult to resist after everything Julian had said about movies back in Williams Ford.

We rode a taxi to the Broadway theater where Julian had reserved our seats, and we mingled in the lobby with a crowd of well-dressed Eupatridians of both sexes. It was clear even before we entered the auditorium that this would be a per for mance infinitely grander than the recruiting film I had seen in the Dominion Hall in Williams Ford. The movie to be shown here, which was called
Eula's Choice,
 was advertised with colorful Lobby Posters, which portrayed a female in antiquated dress, and a man with a pistol; also a horse and an American flag. Julian explained that
Eula's Choice
 was a patriotic story, its debut timed to coincide with the Independence season. He didn't expect much in the way of refined drama, he said, but the movie had been produced by a local crew known for its extravagant camera-work and lavish stage effects. "It ought to be a fine spectacle," he said, "if nothing else."

Calyxa was ill-at- ease among the haughty Eupatridians, and she seemed relieved when a team of ushers appeared to shoo us into the auditorium, where we took our assigned seats.
"All the money that changes hands here," she said, "could feed a thousand orphans."
⁵³

"That's not the way to think of it," Julian reproved her. "By that reasoning there would be no art at all, nor philosophy, nor books. This is an independent theater, not a Eupatridian institution. The profits pay the salaries of working actors and singers, who would otherwise go hungry."

"Singers as well as actors? In that case I withdraw the remark."

The entire theater was powered by an in-house dynamo which thrummed from the basement like a snoring Leviathan. The lights were electric, and they dimmed in unison as the orchestra—a full brass band, with strings—struck up the overture. The curtain rose, revealing a huge white Screen and the veiled booths in which the Voice- Actors and Sound Effects persons worked.

As soon as the darkness was complete the beam of the projector threw an ornate title on the screen:

The New York Stage and Screen Alliance

presents

EULA'S CHOICE

A Musical Story of Antiquity

accompanied by the Dominion Stamp of Approval.

"This ought to be rich," remarked Calyxa, who had seen movies under less elaborate circumstances in Montreal; but Julian shushed her, and the music swelled and subsided as the story began.

I won't describe my astonishment—the reader can take it for granted. I will say that, for once, Julian's pride in Eastern culture seemed justified and wholly excusable. This was Art, I thought; and on a grand scale!

The story took place at some unspecified time during the Fall of the Cities. The main characters were Boone, the beleaguered pastor of an urban Church; Eula, his fiancé; and Foster, a thrifty industrialist.

The show was divided into three Acts, itemized in a Program Book the ushers had distributed. Each Act featured three songs, or "Arias."

There was no singing at first, however—only Spectacle, as the audience was treated to flickering scenes of a City of the Secular Ancients in the last stage of its decline. We saw many impossibly tall buildings, artfully constructed of paper and wood, but fully real to the eye;
we saw streets crowded with Business Men, Atheists, Harlots, and Automobiles.
⁵⁴
Boone and Eula appeared, working together in Boone's small pious church, and bantering in a way that suggested their approaching nuptials; but they were interrupted by a troop of Secular Policemen who barged in and accused Boone of speaking such forbidden words as "faith" and "heaven." These thugs led Boone away to prison, while Eula wept piteously. Boone, as he was dragged through the street in chains, sang the first song, which according to the program was:
Aria: The hand of God, not gentle.