Cleander kept a dozen scribes in his small home-double the number Emperor Mathias had kept ten years before, as Cleander reasoned the Empire had become twice as complicated and at least twice as difficult to rule since the time of instantaneous communications. To these twelve Cleander dictated letters to every legal and military official across what was left of his realm. In doing so he exerted his rule over four billion subjects, or at least he said he did, though in fact many of our fellow citizens had either died from want or had tossed off the Empire's yoke during the past decade. Cleander was busy with his dozen chosen men when Father was admitted to his residence. Cleander lifted his head to Father but did not salute the general and continued to stroll around the long table at which his scribes (who had not one computer among them) were seated while he read from a document he held before him. He pointed with his free hand to a place on a bench he wanted Father to sit.
"You have arrived, General Black," he said. "Good. I told the emperor he should send for you in this time of crisis. You soothe him. It is very odd. I think you remind him of his father, the divine Mathias. Not that you are the learned scholar Mathias was." (He condescended to glance at Father a second time.) "I mean to say: you are a career soldier ... and a brave one ... and apparently honest. The emperor meets so few honest men here in Garden City." The chamberlain permitted himself to make a small laugh. Father told me later that these fleeting seconds of amusement were the only time he saw Cleander become almost jolly in a normal, human manner.
"There is a crisis, sir?" Father asked.
"Two of them, if you count the viral plague," sighed Cleander. "I do not. Biological plagues decimate the lowest, most dependent sorts of people more than anyone else; that translates into less crime, fewer bellies to fill, fewer spectacles to put on for their entertainment, and many more affordable flats to let. The price of bread and housing goes down. One can almost walk the streets in safety, provided one has a few armed guards with him. No, I do not at all see the viral plagues as necessarily bad things. Looked at from an administrative perspective, a plague among humans can be a blessing, really it can. The metal plagues are, of course, always with us. We have electricity only in a few isolated places. But then, there has to be more to our civilization than electricity, doesn't there? The other crisis, the real one, is a conspiracy. You might not have heard of it in the East, isolated as you are there. It would seem certain persons in the city wish to have me removed."
"Imagine that," said Father, who did not take the precaution of speaking under his breath.
"As the city rat in the famous anecdote said to the country rabbit: `There goes a man who runs the risk of being witty,"' said Cleander, not in the least outwardly perturbed at Father's remark. "Don't try to be clever or whatever you were trying to do. Wit doesn't suit you, sir. Anyway, I believe your friend Mr. Golden is a principal in this plot against me. Has he ever written to you concerning one Patrick Dion? Don't bother lying. I will know if you do."
"Mr. Dion is somehow mixed up in the fuel business with Mr. Golden, isn't he?" said Father.
"He was a fuel factor," said Cleander, ever moving in a circle around the room of busily scribbling men. "The emperor, in his divine wisdom, has made him commissioner of commodities, a very important post, given our present constant wants. Coming as he does from that cadre of speculators who call themselves merchants, this Patrick Dion is on very good terms with those he should be controlling. He is the wolf appointed to watch over the farmer's sheep ... or so my people tell me. My people tell me much, General Black." (Cleander had, thanks to the emperor's immersion in his private diversions, taken control of the Empire's network of internal informers, and could hear the grass grow anywhere the PanPolarian flag still flew.) "That is how I know what a stiff-necked Spartan boy you are. You, Peter Justice Black, may be the last grown man alive to believe the tripe you gentlemen types were taught in school. Washington crossing the Delaware and Pius Anthony living on bread and water and all of that, I mean. In sum, you seem to be the upright man you present yourself to be, not the conspiring hero I feared you might be. Then again, perhaps you are merely stupid. Either way, go to the emperor and be the upright man for him. He will like that. While you tarry in Garden Cityand you won't be here forever, mind you-I hope you have enough sense to stay away from Dion and that fat sack of filth Golden. For the time being, they are under the emperor's protection. Something about the Concerned One feeling they haven't broken any laws, yet. Laws." (As he pronounced this single word, Cleander rubbed his thumb against his index finger, as though he were getting the feel of such an insignificant matter.) "That will change. Should you hear anything, you will of course want to tell me of it. Do you know how the food business works in the capital these days, General?"
"It comes to Garden City mostly from points north, I believe," said Father.
"Not anymore," said Cleander. "We can't import much of anything from a great distance. Food from the big plantations here in Mexico is much cheaper than anything that has to be shipped. Much better this way: gives even the lowliest workers a purpose and takes the old North American farming stock-like you, general-out of the countryside and into the army. But back to the food trade: the factors buy up the shipments before they arrive in the capital. They sell it at a price as high as the market will allow. If they hold the goods in their warehouses outside the city long enough, the price soars. We will have to change the process, someday. The factors have entirely too much power. They are constantly stirring things up."
My father could never mask his thoughts. Upon hearing Cleander criticize someone else for having too much power, both of Father's eyes widened in disbelief. Cleander noted the change in the general's expression and stopped padding the floor in his felt slippers.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing, sir," said Father.
Cleander stared at the general for what seemed to Father to be eons longer than was necessary. The chamberlain pressed his eyelids closer together and strained to peer more deeply into Father's eyes. The dozen scribes seated at their dim oil lamps had seen this expression on their master's face before; they each moved their ball-point pens with a new speed to demonstrate to him what hardworking servants they were.
"You may go now," said Cleander, and having overcome an angry moment without blemishing his external serenity, he returned to the work of dictating to his men.
Father had a warmer reception inside the palace's inner precincts. Yet again the emperor was pleased to accept him inside the very chambers in which he lived, a rare invitation Luke Anthony did not extend to everyone. On this occasion Father noticed the previously white marble walls inside the palace no longer displayed holograms and had instead been decorated with hundreds of stone reliefs the Concerned One had "borrowed" from various sites in his realm; there were also displays of precious amber jewels from the Baltic states, golden trinkets from the ancient Meso-Americans, and antique suits of armor from Britain and Spain. These ostentatious displays were supposed to make one appreciate how many nations were currently within the slipping grasp of PanPolaria. Father said he thought the new artworks only made the place seem more crowded. When he entered the palace, it was not yet time to dine; nonetheless, the Concerned One had set out a small table for Father because the emperor said he feared the old man must be hungry after his long journey by horse from Tampico. Servants dressed in strange red headdresses the Concerned One claimed were in the Aztec style brought Father baskets of fresh bread and grapes for his solitary meal while the emperor fussed over him like a fastidious headwaiter. A beautiful Mexican woman played a harp and sang like a nightingale to ease Father's digestive functions as he ate his welcome repast.
"We are so grateful to have you here, my faithful friend," gushed the Concerned One, and he gently patted Father's knee.
"The emperor is looking well," said Father, at the same time wondering if this pleasant reception were not some sort of ruse to set him up for the moment armed City Guardsmen came charging
out of the side halls.
The Concerned One had been maintaining his strenuous system of exercise and diet during the four years we had been away. He fenced every day with Japanese long swords, jogged five miles around the gardens, and wrestled for two hours with his athlete friends. Father told me the emperor's body rippled with hypertrophied muscles anyone possessing eyes could behold, as the Concerned One went about the palace as bare-chested as a cabana boy and wore only a silken loincloth about his waist. His skin was golden brown from many hours spent in the sun. His blond hair and beard were fuller and curlier than Father remembered them to be in years past. A servant followed the lovely new-look emperor about the vast palace carrying an open bottle of perfume from the Canary Islands and a cluster of ostrich feathers, the latter of which the young servant dipped into the powerful fragrance every few seconds and whisked onto the emperor's broad back. ("If I were a woman or a freethinker from the West Coast," Father told me later, "I would certainly be attracted to him. As I am and have to be, I felt damned uncomfortable having him sitting across from me in that little bitty getup of his.") The chief mistress, Marcie Angelica, and the giant wrestler Norman were also present to greet Father. The woman had been following the same routine the emperor had been partaking of, and Father said she was as muscular as most soldiers. ("Let me say again," Father told me, "if I were a woman, I might have found her attractive, too.")
"It's an odd world, isn't it?" said the Concerned One, sitting himself on a footstool directly across from Father and striking up a conversation as though he were Father's oldest friend and they were going to have a casual chat.
Father agreed with him on the point of it being an odd world.
"One never knows who we can trust," said the Concerned One. "I thought I could trust that fellow Cleander once, years ago." (He bent over the small table containing Father's food and whispered his next sentence.) "You know, General Black," he said, "I don't think he has been entirely forthright with me."
Father allowed he had heard certain rumors.
The Concerned One told Father there had been two more attempts on his life while we were in Turkey. One plot had involved poisoning the emperor's dinner. The plotters had succeed in killing the imperial taster, who, said the Concerned One, was easily replaced; given the abundance of starving people in the city during these times of constant shortages, it had been a simple task to find a man willing to eat a bite from each of the emperor's dishes in spite of the obvious risks. On the second occasion someone tried to assassinate him, one of the athletes training with the emperor had somehow substituted a sharpened steel sword for the dull lead one he usually had during sparring sessions.
"I have a scar on my forearm from that," said the Concerned One, and showed the same to Father. "The rogue backed me into a corner. He would have got me if Norman here hadn't broken the rascal's spine."
The giant standing behind the emperor grunted at the mention of his name.
Before this time in his life the motto the emperor had lived by was "I can, therefore I will." He daily committed such atrocities as raping young virgins and running at night with an armed gang and associating publicly with actors, and he had taken pleasure both in the sordid acts themselves and in knowing he was offending his late father's standards of conduct. During this interview Father recognized something different in the emperor's speech and mannerisms. The Concerned One no longer calculated how he would affect others. When he spoke he sounded as sincere as a child-an impossibly naive child who happened to be the titular head of a gigantic and collapsing empire. Other than his obsessive regard for his personal appearance and the stolen objects of art in the hallways, much of the extravagance was gone from Luke Anthony's court, and the new drabness signaled more than the lack of electronic equipment. Marcie was the sole courtesan Father could see in the emperor's living chambers. The palace no longer hosted thirty-course banquets, for, as I said above, the Concerned One had adopted an athlete's diet. The guards standing watch about the palace grounds-and there were remarkably few of them com pared to the small army that had attended the emperor earlier in his reign-were Mexican policemen instead of the ermine-robed Canadian mercenaries and City Guardsmen dandies in their gold-embossed body armor the emperor had once favored. Time makes sense of nearly everything, and the something different Father sensed in the emperor, this new austerity in his home and habits, which Father vainly hoped marked the onset of the emperor's long-delayed maturity, was actually the first signs of the madness that would dominate the later portion of the Concerned One's life. The excesses of his youth, the murders he had committed upon gaining sole rule, the sudden and violent deaths of his former associates, and the attempts to assassinate him had worn on the son of Mathias the Glistening like running water wears on stone, and in his later twenties the Concerned One was beginning to change from being the most evil of men into the most insane.
The emperor confessed to Father he was worried about his legacy. He said he had been reading Drummond's book about the first twelve emperors and he had realized he had not accomplished as much as they had.
"Darko built most of the city we see today," explained the emperor. "I have left my name on only one important building, and Cleander built that for me."
"Pardon me for saying this, my lord," said Father. "I have a faulty memory of Drummond. My daughter, I think, read him to me once. Isn't his section on Darko, well, isn't it rather unflattering?"
"Yes, indeed. Drummond was on the side of the Senate. The Senate and the Republic and all that. Most of those moralists were. Except for my father," said the Concerned One, and he stole a piece of cheese off Father's platter and had raised it to his lips, but put it back when he saw the formidable Marcie frowning at him. "Drummond was tough on most of the really interesting rulers: on Cepphus the Stealthy, on Tyler the Ostentatious, especially on Darko. The people didn't share his opinion. To this day, General, the people put fresh flowers on Darko's grave every month. They loved him. Still do. A man doesn't cut that big a swath through the world and not win the love of a lot of people. I mean to say, he killed so many, he had to have killed quite a few the people hated."
"Wasn't Darko, my lord, supposed to have burned the original capital in the north so he could build the new one here in Mexico?" asked Father.
"Rubbish," said the Concerned One. "Drummond himself doesn't claim that. He accuses Darko of flying a kite in Maryland while the city burned. That is an idea though, isn't it?" (The Concerned One paused and fingered his chin.) "What were we discussing when I first came in here?" he asked Father when he spoke again.
"My lord," said Father, "you were saying how difficult it is to find someone you can trust. Next, you reflected upon Cleander-"
"Don't mention that snake to me!" roared the Concerned One and became agitated. "He's the one plotting against me! I know it's him! You're not a friend of his, are you?"
"My lord," said Father, who had dropped a small scone when the emperor exploded, "I hardly know the man."
"Good, very good," said the Concerned One, regaining his composure. (He slapped himself on the thighs and frowned.) "He is a very, very bad man, General. Always scheming." (Again he leaned forward to whisper to Father.) "We are going to steal a march on him this time. Our side ... you have a friend among the fuel factors, don't you?"
"Yes, my lord, the famous speculator Mr. Golden is a friend of mine," said Father. "We are related through marriage."
"There you go then," said the Concerned One, and sat upright on his footstool. "You are already in on it then."
The emperor made meaningful gestures to Marcie and the giant Norman.
"In on what, my lord?" asked Father.
"Oh, that is good, Black," chuckled the Concerned One. "Play dumb. That will throw them off the trail, eh?"
"In fact, my lord," said Father, "no one has told-"
"No need to speak of it," said the Concerned One, and held up a hand. "You never know who is listening." (He glanced about the vast, utterly empty
room.)
"Cleander's men are everywhere. Remember that, General Black. You'll need to be careful of everything you say if you're going to live in the palace with us."
"Here in the palace with you, my lord?" said Father, putting little joy into his words.
"To keep an eye on things," said the Concerned One. "I don't know what we'll call you. Everybody here has a title of some sort. I have some fool already whom I call the Chief Guardsman.... Would you like Marcie to think of a title for you? She's very good at that sort of thing. She thought of whole new names for the months of the year I'm going to use someday. I'm sure she can come up with something for you."
"I would rather not distress the lady, my lord," said Father. "I am content to remain the governor of Turkey."
"Of course you can still be governor of Turkey," said the Concerned One, and clapped his hands. "I'll make you governor of Arabia and Armenia too, should you want that. Do we still rule any part of Armenia and Arabia?" (He looked to Marcie, and she explained that Pan-Polaria influenced the governments in those lands, but they both had their own rulers.) "Well, how about Lithuania?" said the Concerned One. "I've never been there. They tell me it's a terrible cold place; however, I do enjoy saying the word. Lithuania. Lithuania. Lith-u-a-nia. You say it, Black."
The Martian General's Daughter Page 16