Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Yes; but it pains me,” Lymon Pugh said.

  “The job, or the leaving of it?”

  “I supported my mother there. I might have stayed, but I hear the packing industry out east has boomed just recently. My idea was to get a bigger wage and send part of it home.”

  “That seems sensible enough, though your fingers might be whittled off as quickly in New York as in Cascadia.”

  “I might get better work than boning, with luck. Canning, say, or even overseeing. But I had to leave in a hurry, is what galls me. I had an argument with the shift boss, which left him with a broken rib, and he would have had me arrested if I hadn’t collected what I found in his pockets and bought passage east. I didn’t have time to tell my plans to my mother—for all I know she thinks I’m dead.” He shuffled his feet. “Though I guess I could write her a letter.”

  “Yes; you should—that’s exactly what you should do.”

  “Except but that I can’t write.”

  I told him he wasn’t alone in that regard, and that it was nothing to be ashamed of; but he wasn’t consoled. He shuffled his feet again and said, “Unless I can get a person to write it out for me.”

  Now I understood his object in approaching me, and it seemed a reasonable enough request—better than risking another controversy, anyhow. So I offered to take his dictation; and Lymon Pugh grinned hugely, and insisted on shaking my hand again—a habit he ought to refrain from, I told him, for his grip almost crushed my fingers, and made it difficult for me to grasp the pencil.

  Then the obligation of actually composing his thoughts fell upon him, and he stomped about for a few minutes, muttering to himself.

  “Just say what you’d say if your mother was here in front of you,” I suggested.

  “That’s no help—if she was here, I wouldn’t need to write a letter.”

  “Well, then, make any beginning you want. You might start with Dear Mother, for example.”

  He liked that idea, and repeated the phrase several times, and I made a show of writing it on a fresh page in my notebook, and he looked at the marks with admiration. Then he frowned again. “No, it’s no good. A letter won’t work. My mother can’t read, any more than I can.”

  “Well, in that case … do you know anyone who can read? A cousin, a friend of the family?”

  “No. Except the man who runs the company store. He can read—I’ve seen him lettering signs—and he was always friendly enough when we came in.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Mr. Harking.”

  “Then we can ask him to carry the message to your mother on your behalf. I’ll cross out Dear Mother, and write in Dear Mr. Harking—”

  “No, sir!” Lymon Pugh exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “That would be an impertinence, if not something worse! I never called him ‘dear’ in my life, and I don’t propose to begin now!”

  “It’s just a salutation.”

  “Call it whatever you want—maybe that’s how they do things in Athabaska—but in the Valley a man don’t call the grocer ‘dear’—it’s not suitable!”

  “Look,” I said, “this project is poorly thought-out. Why don’t you consider what you want Mr. Harking to say to your mother on your behalf—sleep on the question—and in the morning we’ll start again: how about that?”

  “I hate to postpone it,” he said, “but—well, it feels like the train’s stopping anyhow. Are we in New York already, do you suppose, or is it just another watering hole?”

  Neither, as it turned out. The Travel Agents stood up briskly and hoisted their rifles. They shouted the train awake, and when the passengers were all standing and blinking the foremost of the two men called out, “You two! Crack that door.”

  Lymon Pugh and I unbolted the long door and slid it open. What we saw outside was no coaling station. Instead we faced a crowd of uniformed soldiers, and beyond them a sea of tents, and an open space in which men marched to orders, counting cadences.

  “A soldier camp!” Lymon Pugh exclaimed.

  The Travel Agent directed us to climb down from the Phantom Car, and the other passengers followed behind. I waited with the milling crowd in the sunlight until I could sidle closer to Sam and Julian.

  “Are we caught?” I whispered.

  “Not caught,” Sam said in disgust, “just sold. The Trust took our money and sold us to recruiters, a double sale. I should have guessed something was up when the ticket-seller at Bad Jump inquired so closely about your ages. I was foolish,” he said bitterly, “and now we’re in the infantry, or will be soon enough, and bound for Labrador by summer.”

  I wanted to question him more closely, but a man in sergeant’s stripes formed us up into two lines and marched us off to be deloused.

  ACT TWO

  THE INVENTION OF CAPTAIN

  COMMONGOLD

  EASTER, 2173–EASTER, 2174

  Happy is the bride that the sun shines on, And blessed is the corpse that the rain rains on.

  —Saxon proverb

  1

  Here begins that portion of the narrative with which my readers may already be somewhat familiar, that is, the passage of Julian Comstock into the person of Julian Conqueror; but that transformation, and its consequences, have been so often misrepresented that even a scholar of Recent History may be surprised by the story as I saw and experienced it—and by my part in it, for that matter.

  Certainly Julian was no Conqueror as we arrived at the mustering camp, though he soon enough ceased to be a Comstock.

  “Give a false name,” Sam told Julian when, as a part of a line of sullen men from the Phantom Car, we approached a tent in which Army physicians waited to examine us and Army clerks stood ready to enter us into the rolls. “Do that, and we’ll be safe from the inquiries of your uncle—if not ‘safe’ in any other sense of the word.”

  “What name should I give?”

  Sam shrugged. “Anything that appeals to you. ‘Smith’ is a popular choice.” (Though I couldn’t picture Julian as a Smith, a Jones, a Wilson, or any of those penny-a-bushel names: they didn’t just suit him, somehow.) I asked Sam if it would be all right for me to continue as Adam Hazzard, and Sam said he supposed so, much to my relief. My family name may not have been aristocratic, but my father would have been ashamed if I had altered it.

  But before we were set down on paper we had to be evaluated by the medical faculty: two bald men whose stained cotton smocks might once have been white, who listened to our hearts, and thumped our backs, and generally made quick work of their observations—though they did turn away seven men.*

  I don’t know what happened to the rejected men. I believe they were put back aboard the Phantom Car, perhaps to be abandoned at some switching station along the main line, and probably robbed in the process.

  Sam himself was the object of considerable scrutiny because of his age. He told the examining physician he was thirty-two; but we were required to disrobe, and Sam’s body betrayed the lie in its wrinkled and leathery flesh. But he was also strong, and lean, and sound of breath; and after only a little discussion the doctors gave him their approval. Julian and I were ushered through more quickly.

  Then we were made to line up beside a trench into which we dropped our familiar clothing, retaining only a few possessions in satchels or “ditty-bags” provided by the Quartermaster, while a scrawny recruit doused our naked bodies with yellow powder from a bucket—an insecticide, intended to kill lice, fleas, and other vermin.

  The dust was noxious, and it coated our hair, our skin, our throats, and our lungs. It burned our eyes so badly that we were soon weeping as helplessly as infants, and we coughed and gagged like consumptive patients in the final stages of that disorder. We were nearly murdered by it, in other words; and I suppose even the lice among us must have been badly inconvenienced, though at the end of a week they had rallied and staged a come-back.

  As soon as we had recovered our breath we were lined up in front of a Company Clerk,
who marked our names on a list of inductees. Sam gave his name as Sam Samson, which drew a skeptical look. I registered as Adam Hazzard, and pronounced my name proudly despite the fact that I was shivering, and clad mainly in a coating of insecticidal dust. Then Julian stepped up. He was still dizzy under the influence of the yellow powder, and when asked his name he began, “Julian, Julian Com—” at which point Sam delivered a kick to his shins. “Commongold,” Julian finished, adding a little cough.

  It was a striking pseudonym, I thought, and entirely appropriate: Julian Commongold, gilded in lice powder and abandoned among the common folk; but a noble name for all that, rich with dignity. “It suits you,” I whispered.

  “Little else does, today,” he whispered back.

  Then we were administered an Oath—a pledge of loyalty to Flag and Savior, to the worldly power of the Executive Branch, the wisdom of the Senate, and the spiritual majesty of the Dominion. That was a solemn moment, in spite of our nakedness and uncontrollable shivering.* Then we lined up for uniforms, which were handed out with only cursory attention to size and fit, so that we spent another half-hour bartering coats and pants among ourselves, and warming ourselves at the trench in which our civilian rags had been soaked in spirits and set aflame. At the end of that time a sergeant escorted us to a mess tent in which we were given a hot meal of beef stew, much to the delight of the vagabond men among us, for whom this simple but reliable bill of fare was and would continue to be the Infantry’s great redeeming virtue.

  At last we were assigned to cots, which were arranged in rows under a canvas tent large enough to house a circus (as I imagined), and we had a few moments to ourselves, to smoke or talk as we preferred, by the light of scattered lamps, before “all dark” was sounded on a trumpet. During this time Julian reminded me that New Year’s Day must have come and gone while we were aboard the Caribou-Horn Train. The year 2172 had exhausted itself, and passed into that haunted sepulcher we call the Past; and now it was 2173, a year in which Julian’s uncle Deklan would be inaugurated into yet another term as the uncontested President of the United States, sea-to-sea and equator-to-pole; and I reminded myself that I was now a warrior in that cause, and would remain one for some time to come. By Spring I might be fighting to drive the Dutch from the sacred precincts of Labrador, to reclaim our right to the wood, water, and minerals of that contested State, and to assert our God-granted master of the Northwest Passage. I was, in short, and irrevocably, an American Soldier.

  “You have fallen out of obscurity, Adam, and into history,” Julian said, with only a little of his customary cynicism.

  It was a daunting thought, but exciting, and I was still dwelling on it when my fatigue overcame me and I fell asleep.

  I will not narrate every trivial detail of camp life, or postpone indefinitely my attention to the battles and conflicts in which Julian and I participated. In any event we did not long remain in that crude camp on the winter prairie. We were kept there only for the most basic kind of training, and to weed out men with hidden epilepsy or pox-gaunt, or who were prone to fits of madness or mad-melancholy. By Easter all such draftees would be mustered out, or put to such simple duties as suited them.

  Those of us who remained were naturally curious about our future. Some of the formerly indentured men were ignorant of the nature and purpose of the War in Labrador, an ignorance that made them more fearful than they needed to be. In the great cities there were newspapers to recount the course and outcome of this or that battle, and to chart the overall progress of the War, so that even clerks and wage-laborers might be reasonably well-informed; but the majority of the draftees were landless men and deaf to such sources of information. They took their intelligence where they could find it: from Sunday All-Camp Service or from rumor and hearsay. And some of them took Julian’s counsel on the subject.

  It must not be assumed that our time at the mustering camp was one long round of historical and philosophical debate—of course it was not. We were up early in the morning for reveille, roll call, sick call, mess call, followed by squad and company drill (as soon as we had been assigned to squads and companies), guard mound, adjutant’s call, policing camp (which meant picking up trash); then it was battalion drill until noon, another mess call, regimental drill until the five o’clock mess, general parade, tattoo, and taps—six days out of seven. On Sundays there was no drill, and nothing more formal than a morning All-Camp Service, which allowed for restorative rest and conversation.

  We learned the presentation of arms and the intricacies of parade, and we were introduced to the Pittsburgh rifles that would accompany us into battle. We learned to take our weapons apart and put them together, to keep them clean, dry, and oiled, and in general to treat them with all the tender feeling a young mother might attach to a firstborn infant. As the winter became less severe, and the month of February ended, we were taken on marches across the damp patch of prairie where the camp was situated, allowing our boots to make accommodation with our blisters and vice versa; and we were ordered into mock battles, and tutored in the digging of entrenchments, and taught how to negotiate a cutwire fence, how to attack an enemy’s lunette, and how to follow a regimental flag. We refined our marksmanship on the firing range. We learned to call out marching cadences without blushing at the obscenities in the chants—toughening us against moral as well as physical hardship. In short, we were worked hard and fed well, until we felt proud of ourselves for having survived the ordeal, and considered ourselves superior to the general run of civilian clerks and laborers. We suspected we could not be bested in genuine warfare, and certainly not by the Dutch (as we called the Mitteleuropan forces).

  Julian and I benefited from Sam’s prior tutelage, and we were among the more skillful recruits for that reason—though Sam warned us not to make ourselves too conspicuous. Julian in particular had to feign a certain clumsiness during our drills with horses, otherwise he might have been taken up into the cavalry and out of Sam’s sphere of protection. Sam himself (by design or because of his age) put in a mediocre performance on the endurance exercises, but he was steadily and expertly working up another line of influence. He made a friend of the camp’s Quartermaster, who was also a veteran of the Isthmian War. The rivalry between the Army of the Californias and the Army of the Laurentians meant that neither Sam nor the Quartermaster could expect any favoritism because of their prior experience; and for reasons of anonymity Sam could confess to nothing more than a short “stint” as a foot soldier. But the two men supported each other in extra-curricular ways, and did each other collegial favors; and Sam was soon adopted into the small circle of Isthmian veterans who had found their way into the Eastern forces, including officers. Sam used his influence to keep Julian and me within arm’s length, and to guarantee that the three of us would stay together even after we were dispatched to Labrador.

  Labrador was the subject of many Sunday sermons. Sunday Service was conducted by Dominion Officers, and for that reason, the conflict was cast mainly in spiritual terms. That is to say, the war was presented as a battle between Good and Evil. What was good was full ownership of North America by its natural masters; and what was evil was the claim of “territorial interest” advanced by that ungodly commonwealth of nations known as Mitteleuropa.

  We listened with due attention to these sermons, often delivered at white heat, and we took them to heart. But in the free hours after All-Camp Meeting many of the inductees (including Lymon Pugh and myself) gathered around Julian “Commongold,” to hear him air a more pragmatic version of War History.

  Those talks took place over consecutive Sundays. What Julian told us, in brief, was that the possession of Labrador had been contested, in principle or in fact, ever since the False Tribulation of the last century. The allied nations of Mitteleuropa, while America was still in the grip of civil unrest, had recognized the significance of the Northwest Passage (opened to shipping by a warming climate) and coveted its rich natural resources. They asserted what some call the Steppin
g-Stone Theory of International Entitlement: that because Europe controlled Iceland and Greenland—and because Greenland was just adjacent to Baffin Island—and Baffin Island to the Hudson Strait—hence Hudson Bay—hence Labrador and Newfoundland—therefore all this territory ought to be administered by Mitteleuropa from its bureaucratic palaces at Munich.*

  By the time the Union had rallied and was ready to dispute that claim there were Mitteleuropan coaling stations from Devon Island to Kangiqsujuaq, Mitteleuropan trawlers plying the rich waters of the Foxe Basin, Mitteleuropan warships patrolling off Belcher Island, and Mitteleuropan troops and colonists ashore at Battle Harbor and Goose Bay.

  America fought back, of course. This all happened in the reign of President Otis, who consolidated much of North America under his own unitary rule. It was Otis who gained us such boreal states as Athabaska and Nunavut, and added immense territories to the Union. But Otis’s campaign against the forces of centralized Europe was less successful, and is passed over lightly in the official texts. Suffice to say that at the end of President Otis’s thirty-year term of office the Dutch had secured a permanent foothold in Labrador, occupied rebellious Newfoundland, and taken control of the northern bank of the St. Lawrence all the way from the sea to Baie Comeau.†

  There the matter had rested—or festered; for what followed was decades of clashes between American and Mitteleuropan warships, accusations of piracy, skirmishes along the Laurentians, stern diplomatic notes sent and received, etc. Nevertheless a sort of modus vivendi had prevailed, in which the continuity of commerce took precedence over national pride. The so-called Pious Presidents, who ruled during this interlude, were more concerned with entrenching the power of the Dominion of Jesus Christ, and regulating land use in the prairie West, than with battling foreigners.