Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (64 page)

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."

"To night 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 Lifeand 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 trea sure 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.
¹⁰¹
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 per for mance script. Perhaps it's childish, but I don't like to think of it being permanently destroyed. If the po liti cal 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 what ever 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, what ever 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."