Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Deacon Hollingshead was wise enough not to affirm a positive threat. “Mrs. Hazzard can remain on the Palace grounds, as far as we’re concerned, until her child is brought to term and a trial can be arranged.”

  “You insist on a trial!”

  “The evidence against her is substantial—it warrants an airing.”

  “A trial, and then what? Do you really propose to imprison her?”

  “According to the records we’ve obtained,” Hollingshead said, “it wouldn’t be the woman’s first time in prison.”

  The rest of the session was a blank to me—all I could think about was Calyxa, and it took a profound exercise of personal will to restrain myself from leaping at the Deacon and taking his throat in my hands. Hollingshead was a large man, and I might not have succeeded in choking him to death; but it would have been very satisfying to make the attempt, and I gave it much thought.

  Julian cut the meeting short and asked a Republican Guard to escort Deacon Hollingshead and his man off the grounds. Then he told me to take a deep breath, or else I might explode like a diving Tipman.

  “He means to keep the Writ on Calyxa!” I said.

  “So he says. But she’s safe for now, Adam, and we have enough time to work up a strategy.”

  “Strategy—that sounds too flimsy! It’s as if he’s holding her hostage!”

  “That’s exactly what he’s doing. He means her to be a hostage, and even if I capitulate I expect she’ll remain a hostage, as a check on my behavior.”

  “What good is strategy, if that’s the case?”

  “Clearly,” said Julian, tugging his yellow beard, which made the scar on his cheek dance to the motion, “what we need to do is to take a hostage of our own.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, and he wouldn’t explain. He asked me to keep the details of the meeting secret (especially from Calyxa) until he had worked out certain notions about how to proceed. He said he was determined that the Writ would not stand, and he assured me Calyxa would be safe.

  I tried very hard to believe him.

  On January 1st, 2175, a detachment of Republican Guards surrounded the ancient building on Fifth Avenue that served as the Dominion’s warehouse of forbidden secular books and documents. They forcibly evicted the Dominion curator and his staff and took possession of the building. In an official decree published in that day’s Spark and other city newspapers, Julian announced that “security concerns” had made it necessary to “federalize” the Dominion Archives. “The Dominion’s effort to protect the public from the errors of the Secular Ancients by barring the doors of this great Library, while laudable, has become unproductive in the modern era, when knowledge itself is a weapon of war,” he wrote. “And so I have ordered the Army to secure that institution, and in time to make it accessible to both military and civilian scholars, in order to ensure the continued success and prosperity of these United States.”

  We had our counter-hostage, in other words; only it was a building, not a person.

  Hollingshead sent Julian a fiery protest on Dominion letterhead, which arrived by courier the following day. Julian read it, smiling. Then he crumpled it and tossed it over his shoulder.

  * I did not, in my dispatches, condemn Deklan Conqueror by name, or even mention him; but it was possible to infer from what I wrote that the Lake Melville campaign had been mismanaged from New York. I did record a few cynical comments of Julian’s directed toward “those who cut orders without considering them first, and would make history without having read any.” I thought this barb at the President would be blunted by its obscurity—I may have been mistaken.

  † Not the 53rd—that’s a common mistake. It was the 52nd Amendment that allowed succession by inheritance; the 53rd was the one that abolished the Supreme Court.

  * The law preventing pregnant women from being jailed on suspicion, or prosecuted for proven crimes, dates from the era of the Plague of Infertility. For many years after the Fall of the Cities it seemed as if our human numbers might drop below some critical level—that we would become an extinct species, as so many other species had become extinct during the Efflorescence of Oil. That threat has receded, of course—our numbers are steadily increasing—but the law, along with a host of other laws and customs protecting female virtue and fertility, remains firmly in effect.

  * Sam frowned at this description but said nothing.

  * This is the core doctrine of the Dominion, to which every participating Church must commit itself.

  3

  The months between Christmas and Easter, though I spent them mainly on the grounds of the Executive Palace and under unnerving circumstances, were nevertheless happy ones in many ways.

  Mainly this was because I could be close to Calyxa. She remained under the Ecclesiastical Writ, and could not leave the enclosure, but her pregnancy would have kept her largely confined in any case; and we had Julian’s assurances that he would shelter her from the Deacon’s henchmen, and that she would receive the best medical attention doctors of the Eupatridian class could provide.

  At the same time I was working on the novel I had promised to Mr. John Hungerford, the publisher of the Spark. The title I settled on was A Western Boy at Sea; or, Lost and Found in the Pacific. In part I had taken the advice Theodore Dornwood gave me after the Battle of Mascouche, to “write what you know,” and I had made the hero a young man much like myself, if somewhat more innocent and trusting. Much of the narrative, however, concerned Pacific islands, and pirates, and sea adventures in general. For these passages I employed what I had learned of sailing from my time aboard the Basilisk, along with some generous borrowing from the work of Charles Curtis Easton, whose stories had taught me all I knew about the business of Asiatic piracy.

  The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original. The chapters I showed to Mr. Hunger-ford pleased him, and he declared that the finished product would probably sell briskly, “given the popular taste in such things.”

  Most mornings I wrote until noon, and then took lunch with Calyxa. During the afternoon I would walk for exercise, sometimes in the streets of Manhattan but more often, as the weather improved, on the Palace grounds. The ancient “Park,” as some of the groundsmen still called it, was full of peculiarities to interest the casual stroller. There was, for instance, an elderly male Giraffe—last descendant of a family of those unlikely creatures, donated by an African prime minister during the days of the Pious Presidents—who was allowed to wander freely, eating leaves from trees and hay from the lofts of the horse-barns. It was best not to approach the animal too closely, for he was evil-tempered and would stampede anyone who annoyed him. But he was beautiful when apprehended from a distance, where his shabbiness and bile were less distinct. He especially liked to pass time on the Statuary Lawn, and it was fascinating to see him taking the shade of Cleopatra’s Needle, or standing next to the copper torch of the Colossus of Liberty as if he expected it to sprout green and edible shoots, which of course it never did.

  On rainy days he sheltered in the ailanthus grove near the Pond. There were fences to keep him out of the Hunting Grounds, so he wouldn’t be accidentally shot. His name, the grounds-keepers told me, was Otis. He was a noble bachelor Giraffe, and I admired him.

  There were occasions that winter when Julian, weary of the distractions of the Presidency, came to the guest house and asked me to go rambling with him. We spent several sunny, chilly afternoons walking the preserve with rifles, pretending to hunt but really just reliving the simple pleasures we had shared in Williams Ford. Julian continued to talk about Philosophy, and the Fate of the Universe, and such things—interests which had been rekindled by his exploration of the Dominion Archive and deepened by the tragedies he had experienced at war. A certain tone entered his conversation—melancholy, almost elegiac—which I had not heard before, and I put this down to his experiences
during the Goose Bay Campaign, which had hardened him considerably.

  He visited the liberated Archive often. One Saturday in March I went with him to that contested building, at his invitation. The building’s marbled facade, one of the oldest standing structures in the city, was still ringed with armed guards, to prevent any attempt at re-occupation by the Ecclesiastical Police. We arrived under the careful escort of the Republican Guard, but once inside we were able to roam unaccompanied in what Julian called “the Stacks”—room after room of tightly-packed and closely-arranged shelves, on which books from the days of the Secular Ancients were arrayed in startling numbers.

  “It’s a good thing for us the Ancients were so prolific in their publishing,” Julian said, his voice echoing among the dusty casements. “During the Fall of the Cities books were often burned for fuel. Millions of them must have been lost in that way—and millions more to neglect, mildew, floods, and so on. But they were produced in such numbers that many still survive, as you can see. The Dominion did us a noble service by preserving them, and committed a heinous crime by keeping them hidden.”

  The titles I inspected seemed random, and the books, long neglected by their Dominion caretakers, had not been arranged according to any rational scheme, though Julian had initiated the work of having them catalogued and itemized. “Here,” Julian said, drawing my attention to a particular shelf which his small army of clerks and scholars had begun to arrange, labeled Scientific Subjects. It held not one but three copies of the History of Mankind in Space, all of them pristine, covers and bindings intact.

  He took one down and handed it to me. “Keep it, Adam—your old copy must be getting ragged by now, and there are duplicates. It won’t be missed.”

  This book, unlike the one recovered from the Tip at Williams Ford, possessed a brightly colored paper wrapper, with a picture of what I recognized from previous study as the Plains of Mars, dusty under a pinkish sky. The printed image was so crisp and clear it made me shiver, as if the ethereal winds of that distant planet were blowing out of it. “But it must be very valuable,” I said.

  “There are things in this building far more valuable than that. Authors and texts from the Efflorescence of Oil and before. Think about the Dominion-approved literature we were raised on, Adam, all that nineteenth-century piety the clergy admire so—Susan Warner and Mrs. Eckerson and Elijah Kellog and that crew—but the Dominion readers don’t include Hawthorne from that era, or Melville, or Southworth, just to begin with. And as for the twentieth century, there’s a whole world we haven’t been allowed to see—scientific and engineering documents, works of unbiased history, novels in which people curse like sailors and fly in airplanes …. Do you know what we found locked away in the cellar, Adam?”

  “I’m sure I don’t.”

  “Movies!” He grinned. “At least a dozen of them—movies on celluloid film, in metal canisters, from the days of the Secular Ancients!”

  “I thought none had survived.”

  “I thought so too, until we uncovered these.”

  “Have you seen any of them?”

  “Not yet. They’re fragile, and they don’t run in the simple projection machines we use. But I assigned a group of mechanics to study them and work on the problem of duplicating them for posterity, or at least rendering them into a form more easily viewed.”

  This was all wonderful and daunting. I took books from the shelves and handled them reverently, fully conscious that they had not been regarded by sympathetic eyes since before the Fall of the Cities. Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.

  It was dark by the time we left, and I was dazed by what I had seen. We were silent for a time as the carriage and its military escort passed along Broadway and into the grounds of the Presidential Palace. But I had been thinking about what Julian had said regarding movies, and I was reminded of that project he used to talk about so passionately, namely The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. “What about your movie, Julian?” I asked. “Have you made any advancement on that front?” Julian was busy these days with matters of State; but in his spare time, he had admitted to me, he still contemplated the project, which might now be within practical reach; and he had begun writing a script for it.

  On this occasion he was evasive. “Certain things are difficult to work out. Details of plot and so forth. The script is like a horse with a nail in its hoof—it isn’t dead, but it won’t move forward.”

  “What are the problems exactly?”

  “I make Darwin the hero of it, and we see his fascination with beetles, as a child, and he talks about the relationship of all living things, and then he gets on a boat and goes looking at finches—”

  “Finches?”

  “For the shape of their beaks and such, which leads him to certain conclusions about heredity and environment. All this is important and true, but it lacks …”

  “Drama,” I suggested.

  “Drama, possibly.”

  “Well, the boat is a good touch. You can’t go wrong with a boat.”

  “The heart of the thing eludes me. It won’t settle down on paper the way I want it to.”

  “Perhaps I can help you with it.”

  “Thank you, Adam, but no. I would rather keep the business to myself, at least for now.”

  If Julian’s cinematic work-in-progress lacked drama, the incidents of daily life did not, especially regarding his increasingly hostile relations with the Dominion of Jesus Christ in general and Deacon Hollingshead in particular.

  Sam told me he feared Julian was involving himself in a battle he could never win. The Dominion had a devious history and deep pockets, he said, and Julian’s best bet would be to ingratiate himself with the Senate, and be sure to keep the Army on his side, which would give him greater leverage in any political wrestling match with Colorado Springs.

  But that was strategy for the long run; in the short term it was the threat to Calyxa that concerned us. Julian’s capture of the Dominion Archive did not result in the withdrawal of the Writ against Calyxa … nor did it seem that Julian would be willing to surrender his prize, now that he had it in his possession, even if such a bargain had been offered. But he continued to insist that Calyxa was safe; and I could hardly believe otherwise, since it would require a wholesale revolution before the Dominion could march onto the grounds of the Executive Palace and take her into their custody. In all likelihood, Julian said, Deacon Hollingshead wouldn’t even issue a summons to court; if he did, Julian would see that it was quashed.

  In light of all this he began to take a greater interest in the events that had resulted in the Writ of Ecclesiastical Quarantine in the first place. “This Church where you were Found In,” he asked Calyxa, “is it still in operation or did Hollingshead shut it down completely?”

  The Parmentierist friends Calyxa had made in the city continued to keep her informed of developments. She sat on a sofa in the guest-house (this was late in March, on a windy night), her swollen belly prominent under a maternity dress Mrs. Comstock had obtained for her. She looked beatific, I thought, with her coiled hair for a halo; and I could not so much as glance at her without smiling to myself.*

  “Its former location has been seized and put up for auction,” she said. “But Pastor Stepney managed to avoid arrest. The Church of the Apostles Etc. continues to meet, at a new location … and with a different congregation, since the first batch are still in prison.”

  “I’m curious about this church. We might do ourselves a favor by learning more about the case, as a way of anticipating any new move Hollingshead might make.”

  “Stepney seems like a go
od man,” Mrs. Comstock remarked, “though I only saw him from a distance. I was impressed with him, despite his radical doctrines.”

  (She said this even though she knew the words would make Sam, who was also visiting us that evening, shudder and scowl. She gave him sidelong glances to gauge his reaction, which I suspect she found entertaining.)

  “I could take you there,” Calyxa said, “if I were allowed to travel freely in the city.”

  She was far too close to her term to entertain any such idea, and Julian quickly demurred. Then Mrs. Comstock said, “Well, I for one would like a chance to speak to Pastor Stepney, and get to know him. Perhaps I could go with you, Julian, if Calyxa will tell us the current address.”

  “The last thing we need,” Sam growled, “if for you to be ‘Found In’ a second time. I won’t sanction it.”

  “I didn’t ask for your sanction,” Mrs. Comstock said stiffly.

  Julian forestalled the argument with a wave of his hand. “I’m the one who’s curious,” he said. “And I’m the one Deacon Hollingshead wouldn’t dare to arrest. Perhaps Adam and I can go to this man’s church, with enough Republican Guards to warn us if the Dominion tries some trick.”

  “It would be dangerous even so,” said Sam.

  “Is it Hollingshead you’re afraid of, Sam, or the charismatic Mr. Stepney?”

  Sam didn’t respond to Julian’s impertinent question, but lapsed into a brooding silence.

  “It might be a fascinating Expedition,” Julian repeated. “Will you come with me, Adam? Tomorrow, say?”

  I said I would. In fact I wasn’t much interested in Pastor Stepney’s apostate church. But I was interested in Julian’s interest in it.

  “Stepney is just the type to intrigue Julian,” Calyxa said as I climbed into bed beside her that night. March breezes rattled the big bedroom windows, and it was pleasant to huddle under the thick blankets with my arm around my wife. “Probably a fraud, like most of these unaffiliated pastors, and his doctrines don’t interest me. But he was generous to the Parmentierists who met at his church, and he talked a good line, whenever I happened to overhear him. Not the usual small-church fanaticism. Much about Time and Evolution and such topics, the sort of thing Julian likes to babble about, and he’s as eloquent as any Aristo.”