"`As you have perhaps heard, Claude Whiteman, the commander of the divisions in northernmost Europe, has also proclaimed himself emperor. He has not started to march into other areas. The metal infection is so great in his portion of the world, he no longer has the use of computers or airplanes. My sources tell me that Selin has sent a letter to Whiteman proposing that the new pretender declare for him, and in return Selin has promised to make Whiteman his successor."'
I had been reading the letter to Father. I stopped at this point and asked, "How can Mr. Golden know what Selin wrote?"
"He says he has sources," suggested Father.
"No," I said, "he was told. He is conspiring with Selin. With General Whiteman, too, I expect. He is playing the three of you `emperors' against each other."
"You may be correct," said Father. "I should give some thought to that, whenever I feel better. This is in the Lady of Flowers's hands. If she lets me clear my mind and gives me the signs ... Now I need your and the Lady's help to get up, Justa."
Father had been in his bed since observing the troops' morning exercises. Groups of soldiers came by our house to chant his name and show their support while he rested. As had happened on the day the first letter from Mr. Golden came, I expected the men had been bribed by the couriers to make shows of support. None of their activity moved Father much. He continued to sleep fitfully, when he could, and I hoped he would awake refreshed and feeling strong enough to resist Mr. Golden's pleas.
Toward the sixteenth hour of the day a disastrous event changed the course of Father's life. A group of soldiers brought to our home in the tunnel wall a battered man Father's troopers had captured while he was attempting to approach our house from the rear. From the man's bright new armor and his clean clothes as well as the nanomachines that had infected his weapon he clearly was newly arrived from Garden City and was not one of our dusty Martian veterans. Our men had discovered on the man's person an air rifle and a vial of poison into which he could dip the darts his gun fired. After repeated beatings, the captured man had confessed he had come from Senator Chrysalis. This confession did not deceive Father. Father immediately realized this sort of violence could only come from Abdul Selin and his clan of sun worshipers.
"He's already trying to eliminate me!" pronounced Father. "This man has brought an infection that will trap us on this lifeless planet when it spreads. What choice do I have now?!"
In a fit of panic Father allowed the soldiers to hoist him onto their shoulders and take him to the exercise dome before I had opportunity to put a few words of reason in his ear. On that open ground Father mounted a makeshift dais made of overturned fuel drums and gave a speech to a throng that had rushed from the rest of the camp to hear him. He then said the words other men driven by ambition or fear have said when they began their attempt upon absolute power. He reminded his men they were citizens of a great empire and were heirs to a tradition that had lasted two and a half centuries. Mong, Rogers, Navarro the Younger, the brave Svenska, and Pius Anthony had been Pan-Polarians, orated Father, and every man within the sound of his voice was likewise a member of that same glorious Empire. The whole world cringed before their power. Then, as many would-be rulers among the Pan-Polarians tend to do, Father spoke of the beloved and long-departed Republic. Someday, he said, we would know the freedoms our ancestors enjoyed; someday, he promised, we would again be ruled by the Senate and not by a single man. (He did not speak the obvious: that an empire divided by faction, race, class, language, religion, and the competing ambitions of the elite would plunge into a hundred different civil wars the day the emperor's power diminished. The emperor's absolute power alone holds the Pan-Polarian realm together. The lowliest, most illiterate soldier present knew this; still everyone applauded when Father said the magic word "freedom," though none present could have said what exactly freedom was.) Father said to the men he and they faced a long struggle against implacable enemies. He appealed to the lingering nativism of some of his European and American soldiers by reminding them that his rivals Selin and Whiteman were foreigners from Africa. (Of course nearly every member of his audience on the exercise ground was at least partly of some other race than could have been found among the original Pan-Polarians. Most of them understood so little of the English Father was speaking that they did not understand what he was saying until their officers translated the general's words for them. No less a personage in the Martian mining force than Harriman, Father's second-in-command, was an African and a cousin to General Whiteman. Those things too went unsaid.)
"My dear martial comrades," Father told them, "as long as this good hand shall hold a weapon"-he then held up a trembling conventional rifle-"you will have a champion in me!"
Father wanted next to tell the men the anecdote about the crocodile. Before he could, some of the men near him began to shout in unison a slogan that in a few days' time would be on every wall in the mining tunnels: "Black is the best. The African is worse. The worst is White."
Some of the chanters bore Father from the makeshift stand on their shoulders at the moment he was about to retell how he had used the gun he was holding on the scaly monster of the Nile. Father so enjoyed being carried about by his soldiers that he set aside the tale and waved to the crowd of men as they threw their helmets into the air and cheered. For the time being, he forgot he was an old man and let the men tote him about till past his mealtime and the hour of his afternoon nap.
I watched them from the edge of the dusty arena and asked myself if I was the only one in the station who understood how hopeless our situation was. A little learning, I understand all these years later, makes everyone more than a little vain; others, probably Father himself, knew our fate as well as I did. Everyone there marched and sang and was happy anyway.
he emperor left Father waiting in Garden City for more than a year. The general's health improved during this long interval of doing nothing beyond lying about his house and worshiping his precious Sophia. He became positive again in regards to his future and spoke to me of returning to the East as soon as Luke Anthony gave him approval to leave.
This long stay was my first time in the capital city. Helen and I moved into a tenement building well to the north of Father's house and there slept nights among the city's numerous poor. I was disappointed on this my first visit to find so few of what the history texts would have called the true Pan-Polarians dwelling in the capital of the Pan-Polarian Empire. The bustling city of then over forty million souls seemed to me to match the multinational society of the army, except that the capital was con structed upon a much larger scale, as creating citizens is a simpler matter than making soldiers. One could walk up the fifteen stories of our building and pass through fifteen different nations, none of which were North American, for Garden City, the mother of the northern world, had drawn all her children to the shadows of her mile-high slopes. In the narrow alleyways of our neighborhood I could see no one who might have been a descendant of Darko or even Pius Anthony. There were few thereabouts who could have even spoken to Darko in words the emperor of long ago would have comprehended.
I actually understate the situation: in our tenement there were a total of 1,020 people who came from twenty-nine different lands. We might as well have been in Baghdad or Calcutta, because Garden City looked and sounded the same as any other large city in the world, including those outside the Empire. In the bazaars on our street there were thousands of small-time merchants dressed in the bright orange-and-red synthetic cloth the poor wear everywhere, and they were selling every useless article a person from anywhere could possibly want. I could buy translucent plastic jewelry from the Far East or contraband handheld message machines from Ethiopia or leaves from South America men chewed like cud to make themselves happy for a few hours or strange North African fetishes made to resemble human babies which were sacrificed in lieu of real infants to the savage god Minit.
Everything in the noisy open-air markets was for sale, including the people. Hawkers barking to
the passing crowds sold prostitutes of both sexes and of any size, color, or age the client might desire. The whores of all nations crowding the narrow street wore the blond wigs that mark their profession even if the wearer's skin is jet black. (This, I think, is the street's sarcastic comment upon the original Pan-Polarians from North America.) Most of the foreign children of mother Garden City could only look at the various goods for sale and pray for the day they could purchase them, for they were on the dole, and their meager allowances bought them no more than some highly processed food in a tube and a place to sleep. The lucky ones among the poor found a niche in the street economy, the very lucky found something legal to do in that same marketplace, and the rest lived for the gory spectacles the emperor staged for them in the city's sports arenas now that television rarely broadcast anything other than snow, even when the electrical generators were working. I should confess that Helen and I had an easier life during our stay than did our neighbors in the tenement; we had a little of Father's money and the time to walk to the public baths near the city's central plaza and the cash to pay for the luxury of cleaning ourselves and using the toilets there while our neighbors had to dump their waste in the open sewers that lined the streets, a fact of life in Garden City that made the city smell worse than it looked or sounded.
One morning during our stay in the city, shouts of anger and the clattering racket of rocks ricocheting off stone walls awakened us in our upper-story quarters. Upon looking out, we saw the street rabble had gathered before a fishmonger's shop and were tearing the cobblestones from the roadway and heaving them upon a shapeless heap of dirty rags lying before that shabby place of business, which was merely a stall with a curtain drawn across its open front. Helen and I dressed and ran down the stairwell to see what was taking place. The crowd parted for us, for I always wore the whitest linen outfits and had embroidered hems on my skirts, which made the common folk think I was some manner of nobility, given the soiled and lice-ridden garments everyone else in the neighborhood had to wear. When they had given way to us, I found at my feet a body-rather the bloody fragments of a body-that had once belonged to a small dark woman with elaborately braided hair.
"She's an enchantress!" someone in the crowd informed me.
"She cursed the fish!" an Arab woman told me.
I explained to them, in my overly rational manner and in my unfamiliar version of Syntalk, there was no such thing as an enchantress and they had stoned to death a young woman for no reason.
"She has the idols upon her!" exclaimed the Arab woman. She reached into the gory mess lying before us and produced a calf's ear that had hung about the dead woman's neck.
"See?!" she said as she held the pitiful object before me.
The crowd nodded in agreement, and at once they began overturning the baskets of fish the late witch had supposedly cast a spell upon. They stomped upon the slippery haddock and bonito, some of which were yet alive and flopped about under their feet. When the mob had reduced the fishmonger's wares to sticky and disgusting bits of bone and fins, they tried to set fire to the heap of offal they had created. They found it was all too wet to take the flame, so they pushed the crushed fish and the poor dead woman into a single heap they shoved into the open sewer, where they left it all for the city's overworked policemen to sort out.
Never, not in the most remote places Father had taken me, had I seen behavior that was more barbarous than this completely unnecessary carnage that took place in the heart of the capital. The rough-and-tumble life I knew in the army camps seemed genteel by comparison. In the army there was purpose and order. Men therein at least respected the power of violence, as they knew it could destroy them as well. Among the capital city's citizens violence was something that interrupted the tedium of mere survival; it was neither contemplated beforehand nor afterward remembered. The Arab woman told me with a shrug that other witches and wizards had been killed in the neighborhood and more would die in the future. She advised me I should not give the incident any thought.
I heard it told many times during my time in the capital that food came from the north country, gold and other precious metals from Siberia, culture from Britain, manufactured goods from Japan, soldiers from the Boers, servants from Central America, the new gods from the Middle East, but leaders came exclusively from the prominent families of Garden City. Two months after arriving in the city with Father I learned I had not yet beheld any of these leaders because these "real" Pan-Polarians-the ones owning long, ancient names and even longer lineages that reached back to republican times-lived in the airy suburbs above the city or in the more remote estates on the slopes of the surrounding hills. One saw these leaders of half the world only when the Senate was in session or when they came down to the city in the midst of their flocks of servants to attend an athletic exhibition in the Field of Diversions. The first time I saw them coming down to one of Luke Anthony's grand shows I knew I was looking at the very characters I had read of in Overton's plays and Catman's lyric poems: pampered women wearing their hair piled high atop their heads in turrets of gold and brown and dressed in nearly transparent cloth that was programmed to change colors every ten seconds and who had nothing better to do than gossip and flirt while they hung on the arms of patrician gentlemen wearing big golden rings and leading scores of bodyguards. Never had I seen flesh so white or beheld human skin accented by so much red lipstick and rouge as I saw upon these real PanPolarians on their way to watch men fight to the death for their entertainment. On their necks glistened much of the gold of five continents. Most of the rest of the world's treasure was hidden in secret provincial bank accounts under their celebrated names.
"They have never dug a trench nor fought in the field," was Father's judgment upon the real Pan-Polarians as we watched them line up beside us outside the Field of Diversions. He told me they were not worth gawking at.
Later in my life I can appreciate that the real Pan-Polarians were not as worthless or as idle as Father judged them to be. These elegant people were busy in their beautiful homes writing thousands of screenplays that were so lovely they could never find a producer or director, let alone an audience. They composed millions of poems so fine no one has ever read them. They created mountains of learned treatises upon science and the management of business and government, but their efforts in nonfiction were no more appreciated than was the imaginative literature they had made. The real Pan-Polarians were particularly talented when expounding upon the law, which was an interesting subject to treat during an era of tyranny when there was no law other than the will of the emperor. Yet they filled entire libraries with the mountains of learned treatises they composed upon the subject. Whenever they were not writing or debating, the real Pan-Polarians were conspiring: the women at love, the men at making money, and both sexes were wildly successful in their secretive ventures. The wealth and promiscuity of the Empire's upper classes were the twin wonders of the contemporary world-wonders matched in their magnitude only by the cowardice the same people displayed each time they ran up against the capricious whims of the absolute ruler.
At my first combat show in the Field of Diversions my Father and his legitimate family sat on cushioned seats close to the action with the other real Pan-Polarians while Helen and I had to go high into the crowded plebeian section. From our high ground we could look across the enclosed space of artificial turf on the arena's floor and down onto the emperor's box, which was girded by City Guardsmen and was in the center of the seats on the other side of the stadium. Despite some new girth he had added in the three years since I had seen him last, Luke Anthony remained the handsomest man I had ever seen. Most of the well-born young women seated around him were of the same opinion and were trying (in vain) to catch his eye; they were furiously adjusting their dresses so he might catch glimpses of their bodies and ordering their servants to fetch cold goblets of ersatz wine they rubbed against their bosoms to demonstrate how their delicate persons were suffering in the heat of the Mexican sun. The empero
r did not turn his head toward any of them. Sitting next to him was his wife-yes, he had a legal wife-one Barbara Crisp Anthony; she was a smallish, nut-brown woman the emperor would exile and execute four years later for committing adultery in the palace, though there was never any proof she had committed any such crime or had ever done anything during their marriage other than meekly obey Luke's often insane demands. Immediately above the emperor and watching tiny Barbara as an owl watches a rabbit was the striking beauty Marcie Angelica, the emperor's favorite concubine. Well known among the common people because she was as tall as most men and had an athlete's square shoulders, Marcie had a cascade of black hair that fell to her waist and had yet blacker eyes, the two of which would have set the back of poor Barbara's head ablaze had they the power to shoot flames.
"They say she has killed men fighting hand to hand," Helen whispered to me of Marcie.
"They have something to say about everything," I answered her.
Despite knowing what he was, I felt a flutter inside me when I looked upon the emperor's ruddy, perfect face and the inverted triangle of his powerful frame. I was nearly eighteen. Like every other young woman present I fantasized for a moment I was the doomed Barbara sitting next to him. Were I in her place, I told myself, my love would be enough to make him change. I knew in my heart I could make him become a decent man. Tens of millions of other women must have felt similar emotions in regard to Luke Anthony during the course of his reign.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 9