Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

by Robert Charles Wilson

  I sat by Sam’s bed in his place. For the most part Sam was silent, when he was not sleeping; but occasionally he spoke, and I tried to be an encouraging audience. He mentioned his father once or twice—his Judaic rather than his adopted father—and I attempted to draw him out on the subject when he seemed to need distraction.

  “What work did your father do?” I asked him.

  Sam was very gaunt beneath the blankets that covered him. It was a cold day outside, and a small snow was falling. We had to be chary with coal because of the siege, and the stoves in the hospital did little to dispel the chill. Whenever Sam spoke his words became visible as mist, as if he were emitting his immortal spirit directly from his mortal lungs. “He was a scrapper,” Sam said.

  “He fought for a living?”

  “No, Adam—a scrap-collector. He prospected in the Houston Ship Canal, down in Texas. That’s the territory where I was born.”

  “Is it a good place, Sam?”

  “The Canal? The Canal is hell on earth. It’s a poisonous trench as large as a city, rich in copper and aluminum, made not for human beings but for Oil and Machines back in the days of the Secular Ancients. In the Canal a prospector can make good money in a short time, if he’s smart and lucky. But the risks are terrible. The waters are vile and breed disease. When I was very small I saw scrappers come back from the Canal with blood running freely from their noses, or with their skin turned black and shriveled by contamination. My father was always careful to protect himself with boots and gloves and leather aprons. There were days when he carted out copper or aluminum very nearly by the ton, or soil that could be treated to recover arsenic, cobalt, lead, and other valuable elements, which sell for a premium at the Galveston Exchange. By the time he was thirty he had saved enough money to take his family east. But the Canal killed him the way it killed so many others, only more slowly. He died a year later, in Philadelphia, choked on tumors that filled his chest and neck. My mother was already frail and consumptive—she survived him by less than a month.”

  “And you were adopted by a Christian family?”

  “By a kind but aloof man who was a friend of my father. He and his wife provided for me until I was old enough to be sent for military training, on the stipend my father left for my education.”

  “But you had to renounce your religion.”

  “Rather to pretend it had never existed. Which had been my father’s strategy all along. In my family, Adam, all we had of piety was the lighting of candles on certain winter days and the pronunciation of a few incomprehensible prayers. The family that adopted me knew nothing of it, nor ever would.”

  That was a melancholy confession, and I blushed at the memory of how I had mistaken his prayers for sorcery back in Williams Ford, when I was younger and less worldly. “Would you like me to pray for you, Sam? I can say a Jewish prayer, if you teach me the words.”

  “No prayers, please, neither Jewish nor Christian—they won’t do. I’m not one thing or the other.”

  I told him I understood his predicament, for I was equally a mixed creature, neither a handler of serpents like my father nor as ecumenically pious as my mother. I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result.

  “I hope I don’t need praying over just yet,” said Sam, his voice losing some of its momentary clarity. “I wish I had my hand back, though. I seem to feel it there still—clenched and burning. Adam!” he called out suddenly, his eyes gone watery and vague. “Where’s Julian? Where’s Admiral Fairfield? We need to repulse the damned Dutchmen!”

  “Calm down—you’ll aggravate your wound.”

  “Damn my wound! Julian will want to send me away—don’t let him do it! He needs my advice more than I ever needed my lost left hand! Tell him that, Adam—tell him—!”

  Sam’s agitation attracted the attention of Dr. Linch, who forced a preparation of opium down Sam’s throat, and not long after that Sam’s anxiety yielded to silence, and he fell asleep again.

  “Is he recovering?” I asked the doctor.

  “His fever is increased. That’s not a good sign. There may be some putrefaction in the wound, judging by the smell.”

  “He’ll get better soon, though?”

  “This is a poor excuse for a hospital, Colonel Hazzard, and bound to deteriorate as supplies run low. Nothing is certain.”

  I wanted more reassurance than that, but Dr. Linch was stubborn, and wouldn’t yield it up.

  I did not expect that Julian would really send Sam away, but in fact that’s what happened.

  Admiral Fairfield’s battered Basilisk anchored a little away from the harbor at Striver, and the Admiral came ashore in a launch. We still controlled the harbor, which was beyond the reach of the Dutch artillery, and we would have welcomed the American fleet had it arrived. But, as at Goose Bay, there was only Admiral Fairfield’s ship. The Basilisk, although a noble craft, looked small and forlorn against the chilly waters of Lake Melville and the distant spine of the Mealy Mountains, as sailors swarmed over her rigging repairing the damage she had taken in battle. The Admiral arrived at the dock in a bitter mood, and he was silent as I accompanied him to Julian’s headquarters.

  In the privacy of that building, which had once housed the Dutch Mayor of Striver, in the upstairs bedroom Julian had commandeered for his office, Admiral Fairfield—whose initial skepticism of Julian’s abilities as a commander had yielded to grudging and finally enthusiastic approval—explained that his entire fleet had been ordered out of Lake Melville.

  “Ordered out!” Julian exclaimed. “Why?”

  “The command came without explanation,” Admiral Fairfield said with patent disgust. “From New York.”

  “From my uncle, you mean.”

  “I suspect so, though I can’t say for certain.”

  “And all obeyed it but you?”

  “Officially, the Basilisk is covering our retreat against any Dutch attack. That was my excuse for remaining behind long enough to contribute what I could at Goose Bay—which was little enough—and to come here to consult you.”

  “But you’ll have to leave shortly,” Julian surmised. “And, obviously, you can’t deliver reinforcements.”

  “I cannot, though it pains me to say so. All I can do is offload what extra provisions the Basilisk is carrying, and take away those of the wounded who need better treatment than a field hospital can supply.”

  “Leaving us here,” Julian said, “besieged, until the day comes when we yield to starvation, or surrender ourselves to the Mitteleuropan forces … which is no doubt what my mad uncle intends.”

  “My oath of loyalty prevents me from acknowledging the truth of it. In extremis, General Comstock, you might attempt to break out to the east. A road runs through to the Narrows, though it’s unimproved, and the fortifications there ought to remain in American hands long enough to receive you. But it would be a desperate attempt at best.”

  “Desperate indeed, since we’re considerably outnumbered.”

  “The decision is yours, of course.” Admiral Fairfield stood up. “Leaving you in these circumstances is inexcusable, but I’ve already stretched my written orders past the limits of interpretation.”

  “I understand,” Julian said, taking the Admiral’s gnarled hand in his own with a touching sense of occasion. “I hold no grudge against you, Admiral, and I thank the Navy for everything it’s done on our behalf.”

  “I hope the gratitude is not misplaced,” the Admiral said grimly.

  Julian and I went down to the docks, where Sam and dozens of other seriously wounded men were carried to boats for removal to the Basilisk. I delivered several typewritten sheets to that vessel’s Quartermaster—my war dispatches to the Spark, which the Quartermaster promised to post from Newfoundland.

  We caught up with Dr. Linch, who was supervising the proceedings, and he led us to Sam, who rested in a litter with
a woolly blanket wrapped around him and the fitful snow collecting in his beard. His eyes were closed, and fever-roses flourished on his weathered cheeks. “Sam,” said Julian, laying a gentle hand on his mentor’s shoulder.

  Sam’s eyelids peeled back, and he gazed up into the rolling clouds a moment before his gaze fixed on Julian.

  “Don’t let them take me,” he said in a shockingly frail voice.

  “It’s a question of need, not wish,” said Julian. “Do as the doctor tells you, Sam, and soon you’ll be well enough to resume the fight.”

  Sam wasn’t soothed by these homilies, however, and he reached up from the blankets with his good right arm and took Julian by the collar. “You need my advice!”

  “I can hardly do without it; but if you have any advice, Sam, give it to me now, for the boats are preparing to cast off.”

  “Use it,” Sam said, cryptically but insistently.

  “Use it? Use what? I don’t understand.”

  “The weapon! The Chinese weapon.”

  Julian’s eyes grew wide and his expression mournful. “Sam … there is no Chinese weapon.”

  “I know that, you young fool! Use it anyway.”

  Perhaps he was the victim of a febrile delusion. In any case, if he had more to say, we didn’t hear it; for the litter-bearers carried him off, and before long he was tucked aboard the Basilisk and bound for the Naval hospital at St. John’s.

  I think I had never felt quite so alone as I did when the Basilisk weighed anchor and sailed east—not even on the snowy plains of Athabaska, with Williams Ford and all my childhood standing behind me like a closed door.

  Then, at least, I had been in the familiar company of Sam and Julian. Now Sam was gone … and Julian, in his blue and yellow uniform (slightly tattered), seemed hardly a ghost of the Julian I had once known.

  Among the goods Admiral Fairfield left us was a bag of mail. These packages and letters were distributed to the troops the same day. One of Julian’s adjutants brought me an envelope with my name written on it in Calyxa’s hand.

  Night had fallen; so I took the letter close to a lamp, and opened it with trembling hands.

  Calyxa had never been much of a correspondent—no one would call her wordy. The letter consisted of a salutation and three terse sentences:

  Dear Adam,

  The Dominion threatens me. Please come home soon, preferably alive. Also, I am pregnant.

  Yrs, Calyxa.

  4

  Much could be said about the days leading up to Thanksgiving, as I experienced them. But I won’t belabor the reader with trivialities. Those were dark and hungry times. I kept a careful record, sitting down each night with lamp and typewriter before I permitted myself the luxury of sleep. The pages are still in my possession, and in the interest of brevity I’ll confine myself to quoting passages from them, viz:

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2174

  It has become necessary to exclude what remains of the civilian population of Striver from the town, in order to conserve supplies.

  The residents of Striver were no more or less hostile to us than might be expected of any group of otherwise comfortable men and women subjected to occupation and forced from their homes at gunpoint. Many were relieved to be handed back into Mitteleuropan custody, for that’s their preference, irrational though it might seem to a sane American.* I stood on the roof of our headquarters this afternoon and watched the men, women, and children of Striver trudge across a frosty no-man’s-land between the opposing trenches, protected by nothing more than a flag of truce. Their hunched figures, limned in an early twilight, tumbling now and then by accident into artillery craters, made me feel sympathetic, and I could almost imagine myself among them. Perhaps any man is potentially a mirror of any other—perhaps that’s what Julian means by “cultural relativism,” though the term is reviled by the clergy.

  At least in the hands of the Dutch these unfortunates will be guaranteed a daily meal. We are not. Rationing is in effect. Dutch luxuries taken from the dockside warehouses are counted as carefully as the salt beef and cornmeal, and apportioned along with those familiar foods, strange as it seems for American soldiers to be dining on calculated portions of Edam cheese, sturgeon roe, and mashy goose-liver along with their trail-cake and bacon. In any case, these delicacies serve only to postpone the day when our hunger becomes absolute. Given our numbers, and the accounted supplies, Julian calculates that we’ll be tightening our belts by mid-month, and thoroughly starved by December.

  The men still speculate about a Chinese weapon, and expect Julian to deploy it soon. He refuses to dispel these rumors, and smiles with a sort of mad recklessness whenever I mention the subject.

  My mind, of course, is generally on Calyxa, and her troubles with the Dominion, and the other astonishing news contained in her letter. I am to be a father!—will be a father, assuming Calyxa carries the child to term, even if I’m killed in this desolate corner of Labrador. For even a dead man can be a father. That’s a small but real comfort to me, though I can’t hold back from worrying.

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2174

  The wind blows steadily from the west, and is very cold, though the sky remains clear. Dusk comes early. We burn few lamps, to conserve fuel. Tonight the Aurora Borealis does a chill and stately dance with the North Star. It’s not, unfortunately, a silent night, for the Dutch have brought up their heavy artillery, and shells fall into the town at irregular intervals. Half the buildings of Striver are already blown up or burned down, it seems. Chimney-stacks stand like upraised fingers along empty, shattered streets.

  Julian is moody and strange without Sam to guide and advise him. He insists on compiling a list of goods—not food, but dry goods—contained in the dockside warehouses. Today I assisted at one such inventory, and brought the list to Julian at the mayor’s house.

  The Dutch and their luxuries! The Stadhouders are not just gluttons; they insist on all the subtler fineries of life, it seems. Julian carefully perused the lengthy catalog of textiles, tortoise shells, pharmaceutical compounds, cattle horns, musical instruments, horseshoes, ginseng, plumbing supplies, et alia, ours by right of pillage. His expression as he examined the list was thoughtful, even calculating.

  “You don’t itemize these bolts of silk,” he remarked.

  “There was too much of them,” I told him. “The silk is all crated and stacked high—I expect it had only just arrived when we took the town. But you can’t eat silk, Julian.”

  “I don’t propose to eat it. Inspect it again tomorrow, Adam, and report back about the quality of it, especially the closeness of the weave.”

  “Surely my time could be better spent than by counting threads?”

  “Think of it as following orders,” Julian said sharply. Then he looked up from his lists, and his expression softened. “I’m sorry, Adam. Humor me in this. But keep quiet about it, please—I don’t want the troops thinking I’ve lost my mind.”

  “I’ll knit you a Chinese robe, Julian, if you think it might help us survive the siege.”

  “That’s exactly my plan—to survive, I mean—no knitting will be required—though a little sewing, perhaps.”

  He wouldn’t discuss it further.

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2174

  It occurs to me that Thanksgiving is coming. We have not given very much thought to that Universal Christian Holiday, perhaps because we can find so little to be thankful for in our current situation. We’re more likely to pity ourselves than to count our blessings.

  But that is shortsighted, my mother would surely say. In fact I’m thankful for many things.

  I’m thankful that I have Calyxa’s letter, however terse and brief, folded in my pocket next to my heart.

  I’m thankful that I might be blessed with a child, the product of our possibly hasty but blessed and bountiful marriage.

  I’m thankful that I’m still alive, and that Julian is still alive, though our condition is provisional and subject to change. (Of course no mortal cr
eature “knows the hour or the day,” but we’re unusual in being surrounded by Dutch infantrymen eager to hasten the unwelcome terminal event.)

  I’m thankful that despite my absence life goes on much as it always has in Williams Ford and in every other such simple place within the broad borders of the American Union. I’m even grateful for the cynical Philosophers, grimy Tipmen, pale Aesthetes, corrupt Owners, and feckless Eupatridians who throng the streets of the great City of New York—or anyway grateful that I had the chance to see them at close proximity.

  I’m thankful for my daily ration, though it shrinks from day to day.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2174

  Today our troops overran a Mitteleuropan trench which had been dug too close to our lines. Five captives were taken, and in an act of Christian charity they were allowed to live, though it will diminish our own supplies to feed them. Julian hopes they might be traded for American prisoners already in Dutch hands—he has sent that suggestion by flag-of-truce to the Dutch commander, but as yet no reply has been received.

  I went to see the captives as they were being interrogated, in part to satisfy my curiosity about the enemy, whom I know only as faceless combatants and as the authors of incomprehensible letters. Only one of the men spoke English; the other four were questioned by a Lieutenant who has some Dutch and German.

  The enemy soldiers are gaunt, stubborn men. They offer little more than their own names, even under duress. The exception to this is the single English-speaker—a former British merchant sailor, conscripted out of a barroom in Brussels while he was insensible with drink. His loyalties are mixed, and he doesn’t mind giving estimates of the enemy’s strength and positions.

  He said the Dutchmen were confident that they would prevail in the siege. They were cautious about initiating any attack, however, for rumors of the (unfortunately imaginary) Chinese weapon have reached them. The prisoner said there was no detailed information concerning this weapon,* but speculation about its nature suggested something profoundly deadly and unusual.