Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Calyxa was surprised to see me, and a little miffed that I cut short the curtain-calls. But I caught her by the arm, and told her we were forced to leave Manhattan this very evening, and that Flaxie and Mrs. Godwin were already aboard the Goldwing. She took the news stoically and accepted a few compliments from her fellow players; then we left by a stage door at the rear.

  The crowd in front of the theater was already well-dispersed, but a cordon had been kept for members of the Presidential party, and we were admitted through those lines.

  Sam hailed us as soon as he saw us, but his expression was grim.

  “Where is Julian?” I asked.

  “Gone,” he said.

  “Gone to the docks, you mean?”

  “No, I mean gone, plain gone—gone in the general sense. He sneaked out of the theater with Magnus Stepney during Act III, and left this note with my name on it.”

  With a disgusted expression Sam passed Julian’s note to me, and I unfolded the paper and read it. It had been written with obvious haste in an unsteady hand, but the penmanship was recognizably Julian’s. The note said:

  Dear Sam,

  Thank you for your repeated attempts to reach me with news of the imminent departure of the Goldwing for foreign waters. Please tell my mother and Calyxa that I admire their extensive and thoughtful planning for this eventuality. I regret that I cannot join them, and you, and Adam and all, for the voyage. I would not be safe in Europe, nor would those I love be safe as long as I was among them. And there are more personal and pressing reasons why I must stay behind.

  As unsatisfactory as this explanation is, it will have to do. Please don’t attempt to seek me out, for nothing can change my decision, and I would only be endangered by the attempt.

  I thank you all for the kindnesses you have shown me over so many years, and I apologize for the hardships those kindnesses too often caused you. Thank you, especially, Sam, for acting in the place of my father, and for guiding me usefully even when I defied your guidance. Your lessons were not wasted, and never more than briefly resented. Please be kind to my mother, as I know she will be upset by my absence, and please emphasize my love for her, which is everlasting, if anything is.

  Also thank Adam for his boundless friendship and many indulgences, and remind him of the promise he made to me.

  Yours,

  Julian Comstock (never really a Conqueror)

  “Do you know what he means, Adam?”

  “I think I understand it,” I said in a small voice.

  “That’s more than I do! Damn Julian! It’s just like him to throw a shoe into the works! But about the promise he mentions—”

  “It’s nothing much.”

  “Do you care to tell me about it?”

  “It’s only an errand. Escort Calyxa to the Goldwing, and I’ll join you there.”

  Calyxa made some objection to this, but I was adamant, and she knew me well enough to hear the steel in my voice, and she yielded to it, though not gracefully. I kissed her and told her to kiss Flaxie on my behalf. I would have said more, but I didn’t want to increase her anxiety.

  “Only an errand,” Sam repeated, once Calyxa was settled in the carriage.

  “It won’t keep me long.”

  “It had better not. They say the fire is spreading quickly—you can smell the smoke on the wind even here. If the docks are threatened we sail at once, with you or without you.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope so. I might have lost Julian—I can’t do anything about that—but I don’t want to lose you as well.”

  His statement made me feel very emotional, and I had to turn my head away so as not to embarrass myself. Sam took my hand in his good right hand and gave it a sturdy shake. Then he followed Calyxa into the carriage; and when I turned back they were gone.

  All the crowd had gone away before them. Except for a few Republican Guards still keeping a vigil, the street was nearly empty. Only a single horse cart remained at the curb. It bore the insigne of the Executive Branch.

  Lymon Pugh was holding the reins. “Drive you somewhere, Adam Hazzard?” he asked.

  A few trucks and carriages passed us as we rode up Broadway, all of them headed away from the burning Egyptian quarter. A brisk wind blew steadily along the empty sidewalks, lofting up loose pages from the special edition of the Spark and inconveniencing beggars in the darkened alleys where they slept.

  Sam’s parting words had touched me, and I have to admit that Julian’s unexpected letter caused some turmoil as well. I supposed he had his reasons for doing as he did. Or at least imagined he had good reasons. But it was hurtful that he hadn’t lingered long enough to say goodbye face-to-face. We had survived so many harrowing turns together, that I thought I was owed at least a handshake.

  But Julian had not been himself lately—far from it—and I tried to excuse him on those grounds.

  “He was probably just in a big hurry,” Lymon Pugh said, divining something of my thoughts.

  “You saw the note?”

  “I carried it to Sam myself.”

  “How did Julian seem when he passed it to you?”

  “Can’t say. It was handed out from behind that curtained box of his. All I saw was a gloved hand, and all I heard was his voice, which said, ‘See that this gets to Sam Godwin.’ Well, I did. If I unfolded it on the way, and had a quick read of it, I guess that’s your fault.”

  “My fault!”

  “For teaching me my letters, I mean.”

  Perhaps it was true, as the Eupatridians believed, that the skill of reading shouldn’t be too widely distributed, if this was the general result. But I passed over his indictment without comment. “What do you make of it?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. It’s all above my station.”

  “But you said he might be in a hurry.”

  “Perhaps because of Deacon Hollingshead.”

  “What about Deacon Hollingshead?”

  “Rumor among the Guard is that Hollingshead holds a personal grudge against Julian, and is hunting him all over the city, with a body of Ecclesiastical Police to help him.”

  “I know the Deacon is hostile to Julian, but what do you mean by a personal grudge?”

  “Well, because of his daughter.”

  “The Deacon’s daughter? The one who famously shares intimacies with females of her own sex?”

  “That’s more delicate than I’ve heard it put, but yes. The girl was an embarrassment to Hollingshead, and he locked her up in his fancy house in Colorado Springs to keep her out of trouble. But Deacon Hollingshead’s house was blown up during the trouble with the Army of the Californias. The Deacon was safe here in New York, of course. But he blames Julian for his daughter’s death, and means to take his revenge on Julian directly. A noose or a bullet, it don’t matter to the Deacon, as long as Julian dies.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “No offense, Adam, but news that circulates in the Guard barracks don’t always reach the upper echelons. All of us that Julian hired to be Republican Guards are fresh from the Army of the Laurentians. Some of us have friends in the New York garrison. And talk goes back and forth.”

  “You told Julian about this?”

  “No, I never had an opportunity; but I think the rogue pastor Magnus Stepney might have said something. Stepney has contacts among the political agitators, who pay attention to questions like this.”

  Or it might all be hearsay and exaggeration. I remembered how, back in Williams Ford, a head-cold among the Duncans or the Crowleys became the Red Plague by the time the grooms and stable-boys told the story. Still, that was unhappy news about Hollingshead’s daughter. I had always felt sympathy for the girl, though all I knew of the situation was what I had learned from Calyxa’s pointed verses at the Independence Day ball a year and a half gone.

  “Any particular reason we’re heading back to the Palace?” Lymon Pugh asked, for that was the destination I had given him.

  “A few things
I want to pick up.”

  “Then off to South France, I suppose, or somewhere foreign like that?”

  “You can still come with us, Lymon—the offer stands. I’m not sure what your prospects are in Manhattan just now. You might have a hard time drawing your wages after tonight.”

  “No, thank you. I mean to take my wages in the form of a breed horse from the Palace stables, and ride the animal west. If any horses remain, that is. The Republican Guards are fond of Julian, and remember him as Conqueror, but they can read the writing on the wall as well as the next man. Many of them have pulled out already. Probably some of the Presidential silverware has gone with them, though I name no names.”

  We call people rats, who desert a sinking ship; but in some cases the rat has the wisdom of the situation. Lymon Pugh was correct about the looting and the reasons for it. Ordinarily the Republican Guard is a non-partisan group, and survives these flurries of Regime Change without much trouble simply by transferring its loyalty to the next man in the chair. But Julian had made the current Guard his own animal, and it would sink or swim along with his administration.

  We came to the 59th Street Gate. Apparently some members of the local chapter of the Army of the Laurentians had heard about the sacking of the Palace, and felt they ought to be allowed to join in, since their northern comrades would be marching on Manhattan any day now. A group of these vultures had gathered at the Gate, and were clamoring for admittance and firing pistols into the air. Enough Guardsmen remained on the wall to act as warders, however, and they kept out the mob; and the mob retained enough respect for the Presidential Seal to allow us to pass through, though they did so grudgingly and with some shouted sarcasm.

  I asked Lymon Pugh to make two stops on the grounds of the Executive Palace. One was at the guest-house where, until this evening, I had lived. Calyxa had packed up our most treasured possessions days earlier, in anticipation of the necessity of flight, and these had already gone to the docks. Only a few odds and ends remained behind. One such was a box of souvenirs and mementos, which I had put together without Calyxa’s knowledge, and I took it out of the sadly empty building with me.

  From there we went to the Palace itself. Lymon Pugh had been correct in his description of the Republican Guard’s paradoxical behavior. Some men still occupied their traditional places at the portico, stubbornly “on duty,” while others sallied freely up the marble stairs, and down again, burdened with cutlery, vases, tableware, tapestries, and every other portable object. I didn’t blame them for it, however. As of tonight they were effectively unemployed, with poor prospects, and entitled to back pay in whatever form they could get it.

  I hoped no one had already taken what I had come to retrieve. In that regard I was lucky. Few of these men (some of whom gave me a sheepish salute as I passed them) had ventured into the underground section of the Palace, which still had an unsavory reputation. They had not breached the Projection Room, and the master copy of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin was just where Julian had left it, divided among three pie-tins, along with the score, script, stage instructions, etc.

  I didn’t linger once I had retrieved these things. I suppose, if there had been a prisoner in the Palace’s underground jail, I might have paused to release him. But there weren’t any prisoners to release. The only prisoner Julian had kept was the one he had inherited—that is, his murderous uncle Deklan—and Deklan had since taken up a new residence: in Hell, or atop an iron post, depending on how you look at it.

  Lymon Pugh was waiting when I emerged from the Palace. He had made good on his word, and taken a pedigreed horse from the Palace stables, and fitted it up with a fine leather saddle and saddlebags; and I could hardly rebuke him for the theft, for he had brought along a second horse just like the first, and similarly equipped, for me.

  “Even if you’re only riding as far as the docks, you ought to ride in style,” he said.

  The saddlebags were a convenient way to transport the three reels of Charles Darwin, as well as my other souvenirs, and I packed these things carefully. “But I’m not going straight to the docks,” I said.

  “No? Where first, then?”

  “Down to the rough part of town—a certain address.”

  He was interested in this plan. “Won’t that be near the fire?”

  “Very near—perilously near—but still accessible, I hope.”

  “What’s there?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t ready to confide my awkward hopes in him.

  “Well, let me ride with you at least that far, whatever your purpose is.”

  “You’d be putting yourself in danger.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. If I get nervous I’ll shy away—I promise.”

  It was a welcome offer, and I accepted it.

  Just before we remounted I fetched from among my own goods a spare copy of A Western Boy at Sea (I had packed half a dozen) and gave it to Lymon to keep. He marveled at it by the light that leaked from the Palace doors. “This is the one you wrote?”

  “It has my name on the front. Just up from the Octopus. The Octopus doesn’t appear in the book.”

  He seemed genuinely moved by the gift. “I’ll read it, Adam, I promise, just as soon as I come to a slow spot in my life. Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “here’s something for you, in return. Something to remember me by. Call it a Christmas present.”

  I accepted his gift, which he had made himself, and solemnly thanked him for it.

  We nearly had a disastrous adventure even before we left the Palace grounds. On the way to the 59th Street Gate we rode through the Statuary Lawn, where sculptures and relics from the days of the Secular Ancients were preserved. It was an eerie place even by daylight, and eerier still in the diffuse night-glow of the city, with the copper head of the Colossus of Liberty listing perpetually to the south, the Angel of the Waters gazing in solemn pity at Christopher Columbus, and Simon Bolivar frozen in a cavalry raid on the Needle of Cleopatra. The road twined among these bronze enigmas from ancient times as through a maze. We seemed to be alone in it.

  But we were not. A small group of men on horseback, who must have forced their way through one or another of the Gates, was lurking among the statues, perhaps on the theory that they could rob any Eupatridians or unaccompanied Guardsmen departing the property with loot; and I suppose they imagined they could get away with this outrage, in the general atmosphere of chaos and abandonment.

  Whatever their plan, they saw us coming and rode at us from their hiding place in a tight group. I counted six of them. The lead man did not disguise his intentions, but pulled a rifle from his saddle-holster. “This way!” Lymon Pugh cried, and we spurred our mounts; but the thieves had calculated their attack very finely. They were about to cut off our escape route, and probably kill us for our modest treasure, when the rifleman suddenly looked past us, his eyes wide, and shouted an obscenity, as his horse reared up under him.

  I turned in my saddle to see what had frightened him so.

  It was nothing hostile. It was only Otis, the elderly bachelor Giraffe, who liked to spend his evenings among the statues. All the night-time activity at the Palace had made him nervous, I suppose, and when Otis was nervous he was apt to charge, which was just what he did—he came out from behind Liberty’s battered diadem with his long neck swaying majestically, and galloped straight at the bandits. I think he would have roared, if nature had blessed him with such a talent.

  The thieves scattered in several directions. Lymon and I took the opportunity and fled the scene without looking back, not slowing until we saw the lights of 59th Street.

  I heard some gunfire as we passed out of the Gate. I don’t know whether Otis was injured in his confrontation with the bandits. I believe he was not, though I can’t produce evidence. Giraffes are as mortal as any other creature, of course, and entirely vulnerable to bullets. But I didn’t think Otis would let himself be killed by such low men as those—it wasn’t in his
nature.

  * A bold boast, but that’s how show-business operates.

  * A Broadway voice-actress, famous for her silvery voice and impressive girth.

  * I had not entertained the thought

  That I could love a scholar,

  For they read from books an awful lot

  And seldom spend a dollar.…

  * Giraffes, strictly speaking, are not native to South America; but we had a Giraffe, and we used it.

  9

  I didn’t tell Lymon Pugh our destination until we were much closer to it, for I was constantly unsure of the wisdom of going there; but I thought Julian deserved a final opportunity to change his mind about staying in Manhattan, especially now that the city was burning down; and if I found him (or so I reasoned) I could ask him why he had not offered his farewell by some means less impersonal than a short, scrawled note.

  I wasn’t entirely sure I could find him; but I had a firm hunch as to his whereabouts, and I calculated there was enough time left to pursue the matter, if only just.

  If anything would stymie us it would be the fire in the Immigrant District, depending on how it had spread. As we crossed Ninth Street we were nearly borne back by a tide of fleeing Egyptians. They were a troubled people, despised by the majority. Many of them had left their native country to escape the poverty and warfare of Suez and the sickness that haunts the terrible ruins of Cairo. They had seen destruction before, and they didn’t seem surprised by this fresh catastrophe, but were resigned to it, and trudged along with their packs on their shoulders and their carts dragged behind them as if it were not the first apocalypse they had witnessed or the last they expected to see. They paid us no attention; but we were riding against a human avalanche, and it slowed our progress.

  Soon we could see the fire itself, leaping above nearby rooftops. The flames had already consumed most of the Immigrant District, where the flimsy houses, often appended to old concrete ruins and built from whatever debris could be dug out from makeshift excavations, burned like tinder. All Manhattan’s fire-wagons and water-engines had been brought to bear on the problem, or so it seemed. The pumpers took their water from the Houston Canal, a freight canal, and from the Delancey Canal, a sewage canal—though in practice there was little to choose between them. Debris of the most noxious sort often plugged the firemen’s hoses; and the stench of smoke, char, and boiling human waste nearly turned us back. Fortunately Lymon Pugh had brought along an assortment of paper plague masks (some dipped, as was the Eupatridian custom, in oil of opoponax); and we each donned one of these, and they were modestly useful in impeding the unwelcome odor of the conflagration.