Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (62 page)

August had just given way to September, and the production of
The Lifeand Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin
 was well under way.

Julian had not been idle during the preparation of the book and music. All the power of the Presidency and much of the wealth he controlled as a Comstock had been devoted to it. He had renovated a set of unused stables at the West 110th Street end of the Palace grounds, turning them into a "movie studio" as modern as anything in Manhattan; and he had recruited the talents of the city's finest Production Company, which was called the New York Stage and Screen Alliance. This combination of players, singers, noisemakers, camera-operators, film-copiers,
et alia,
 had been responsible for many well-regarded movies, including
Eula's Choice,
 previously described. In the past, however, they had always been bound by the rules of the trade and the strictures of the Dominion. In this case Julian had taken charge of them directly; and they were bound to his instructions, and no one else's.

On this particular day I was down at the "studio" watching some incidental photography not involving the major actors. It was a day off for Magnus Stepney, who was playing Darwin; and Julinda Pique, the screen actress representing Emma Wedgwood, had gone to visit relatives in New Jersey. But the players interested me less than the technical work of the business, which continued without them. I had befriended the Camera Operator In Charge of Illusions, or
Effects Shooter,
 as he was called for short, and I was helping him arrange "shots" for the South American montage in Act Two. He had set up a painting the size of a wall, of jungles and mountains, uncanny in its realism, and he had placed in front of it some very convincing paper imitations of tropical plants and bushes, as well as wildlife in the form of tame dogs dressed as tigers, and a number of armadillos sent by mail from Texas, mainly living.

Julian had instructed him not to keep the camera still, but to move it around some, giving a more lively impression; and he was doing so as I watched, trying to keep the restive animals in the frame without inadvertently revealing the artificiality of the backdrop. This was warm work on a sultry September day, and it called forth some unusual curses before he achieved the result he aspired to.

He was just "wrapping up" this business when an Executive Page in green livery came hurrying toward us. The man was obviously agitated, and he had to recover his breath before he could gasp out, "There's been shooting, Major Hazzard! Shooting at the Palace, sir!"

I rushed there without waiting to hear more. It wasn't easy getting past the Republican Guards who had cordoned off the Library Wing, and I was alarmed when I saw the court physician hurried in ahead of me. I remonstrated with the Guards until Sam Godwin appeared; then we both proceeded together.

I feared the worst. Julian's position as President had become increasingly insecure as his battles with the Dominion escalated. Just last week he had declared all Ecclesiastical Writs of Replevin null and void, pending new legislation. This meant that the authorities could no longer claim, seize, or imprison fugitives on complaints issued solely by the Church. It had the effect of releasing Calyxa from her confinement, but it also set free countless jailed apostates, the congregations of various Unaffiliated Churches, a number of Parmentierist radicals who had been scooped up on ecclesiastical charges, and a few of those unfortunate lunatics who insist on proclaiming their personal divinity.

The voiding of that law, added to his ongoing attempt to separate the Church from the Military, amounted to an emasculation of the Dominion.

The Dominion could still collect tithes from affiliates, and could pronounce anathema on dissenters, but without legal traction it would soon begin to lose ground—or so Julian hoped.

In response, it seemed they had sent an assassin into our midst: for I did not doubt that the Dominion was behind this treachery. "Is Julian killed?" I asked Sam as we pressed through the crowd in the Library Wing.

"Don't know," said Sam. "Has the physician been called for?"

"Yes, I saw him go in—"

But Julian wasn't killed. Once we attained the Reading Room we found him sitting in a chair, upright and alert, although a ban dage had been wrapped around his head. He called us over as soon as he spotted us.

"How badly are you hurt?" Sam demanded.

Julian's expression was grim. "Not badly, or so the doctor tells me—the bullet took a piece of my ear."

"How did it happen?"

"The assassin hid behind a chair and came out at me unexpectedly. He would have killed me completely, except that Magnus caught sight of him and called out a warning."

"I see," said Sam. "Where is Magnus now?"

"Lying down. The event was alarming for him—he has a sensitive nature."

"I guess an attempted murder would alarm most anyone. What about the assassin—where's
he
?"

"Mauled by the Republican Guards," said Julian, "and taken into confinement in the basement."

The "basement" of the Executive Palace included a set of cells in which prisoners could be detained.
⁹⁶
"Has he said anything useful?" Sam asked.

"Apparently his tongue was cut out years ago, and he can't or won't write.

The Dominion chooses its assassins carefully—it knows how to break men, and tries to make its men unbreakable."

"You don't know for certain it was the Dominion that sent him."

"Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need
certainty
 in order to act on a well-grounded suspicion."

Sam said nothing to this, but shook his head unhappily; for he believed, and often said, that Julian in his argument with the Dominion had set himself on a course for destruction just as certainly as if he had plunged into the rushing waters above Niagara.

"In any case," Julian said, "the man's motivation is plain enough. He was carry ing a crudely- printed leaflet demanding the restoration of Deklan Conqueror to the Executive."

"But if he can't read or write—"

"I expect the leaflet was a prop, meant to draw suspicion away from the clergy, though who but the clergy would want my murderous uncle back in the Executive seat? Still, I don't like to have Deklan used as a nail on which assassins pin their hopes. I'll have to do something about him."

There was a cold glint in his eye as he said this, and neither Sam nor I dared to pursue the matter, though Julian's manner filled us with foreboding.

"And there's the question of the Republican Guards," Julian continued.

"What about them? It seems as if they acted as soon as the assassin revealed himself."

"But they
ought
 to have acted
before
 the assassin revealed himself; otherwise what purpose do they serve? It was luck and Magnus Stepney that saved my life, not the Guardsmen. I don't see how the man could have got this far without a collaborator among them. I inherited those men from the previous regime, and I don't trust them."

"Again," Sam said in a conciliatory tone, "you don't know—"

"I'm the
President,
 Sam, isn't that clear to you yet? I'm not required to
know
; only to
act
."

"How do you propose to
act,
 then?"

Julian shrugged. If he wanted advice from us, he didn't ask for it.

Sam eventually went off to attend to ancillary business, once the atmosphere of crisis began to cool. I stayed to keep Julian company while the doctor removed the temporary ban dage in order to dab the wounded ear with iodine and stitch what remained of its ragged edges. The court physician was as smoothly professional as Dr. Linch had been back in Striver, but there would still be a scar when the injury healed. "My head has been pared more often than a pie- apple," Julian complained. "It gets tiresome, Adam."

"I'm sure it does. You ought to rest now."

"Not just yet. I have business to take care of."

"What business?"

He gave me a look that was almost metallic in its indifference.

"Presidential business," he said.

No mention was made of the attempted assassination in the city press, for it was a delicate subject; but Julian arranged to make public his response to it, as I discovered the following morning when I left the Palace grounds for a walk down Broadway.

A crowd of pedestrians thronged the street beyond the 59th Street Gate, gazing upward with wide eyes. It was not until I reached the sidewalk outside the great walls that I could see what had attracted all their attention.

High on the iron spikes that surmount the stone wall two Severed Heads had been mounted, one to the left of the Gate and one to the right.

This was as gruesome a sight as anything I had seen in Labrador, more shocking for its presence in an otherwise peaceful city. However, it was not without pre ce dent. The heads of traitors had been displayed here in earlier years and other conflicts, though seldom since the turbulent 2130s. From ground-level it was difficult to discern the identity of the victims, since the heads were contorted by death and had been pecked at by pigeons. But some of the curious onlookers had fetched opera-glasses in order to satisfy their curiosity, and a consensus had emerged among the crowd. The head on the left was not familiar to anyone present (nor could have been, for it belonged to the assassin captured in the Library Wing). The head on the right, however, was the one that had recently rested on the shoulders of Deklan Conqueror, the former President, who had once feared his nephew as a usurper, and had nothing to fear now but the judgment of a righ teous God.

The unpleasant trophies remained there most of a week, rotting. Small boys gathered every day to toss pebbles at them, until the ghastly ornaments at last came loose from their spikes and tumbled back onto the Palace grounds.

Julian wouldn't speak of the beheadings, saying only that justice had been done and that the event was finished. I hoped he had not
ordered
 the executions, but had only
sanctioned
 them—though that was bad enough. I did not, of course, feel any sympathy for Julian's uncle or the anonymous assassin, since the former had committed many murders and the latter had attempted at least one. But the cutting off of their heads without benefit of trial did not seem to me entirely civilized; and I could not help thinking that the public display of their remains served no better purpose than to make Julian appear brutal and imperious.

During that same week, in another imperious act, Julian dismissed every serving member of the Republican Guard—some five hundred altogether—and replaced them with members of the Army of the Laurentians, selected by Julian personally from a list of those who had fought by his side at Mascouche, Chicoutimi, and Goose Bay. Many of these men were my comrades as well, and it was startling to walk down the halls of the Executive Palace and find myself greeted not with the malign stares and suspicion to which I had become accustomed, but by hearty hails from old friends and acquaintances.

That feeling was compounded one Friday evening when I went to join Julian and Magnus Stepney to plan out the next week's efforts on
CharlesDarwin.
 The new Captain of the Republican Guards, whom I had not met, was standing watch over the Library Wing when I turned a corner in one of that building's long halls and nearly collided with him.

"Watch out," the new man cried, "I'm not a door you can swing wide and walk through—state your business, mister—but—
be damned if it isn't AdamHazzard!
 Adam, you bookworm! I'll shake your hand or know why not!"

He did shake my hand, and it was a bruising experience, for the new Captain of the Guard was Mr. Lymon Pugh.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so glad to see him, but at that moment he seemed like an envoy from a simpler and easier world. I told him I hadn't expected to meet him again, and that I hoped the Palace was a good place in which to find himself employed.

"Better than a slaughter house," he said. "And you! Last time I saw you, Adam, you had just married that tavern singer from the Thirsty Boot."

"I did, and we have a daughter now—I'll introduce you!"

"You wrote a book, too, somebody told me."

"A pamphlet about 'Captain Commongold,' and a novel which is selling adequately well; and I've met Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, and worked beside him. But you must have accomplished things just as significant!"

He shrugged. "I lived to my present age without dying," he said. "That's enough to boast about, by my lights."

Calyxa kept her distance from
The Life and Adventures of the Great NaturalistCharles Darwin,
 as well as from Julian himself. Having supplied the score and lyrics, she felt no need to involve herself in the minutiae of movie-making, especially during a time when she was instructing Flaxie in the fundamentals of eating, and standing upright, and such useful skills as that.

She continued to meet with Parmentierist friends from the city, however, and Mrs. Comstock (or Mrs. Godwin, as I could not get accustomed to calling her) pursued certain of her contacts among the lesser Eupatridians. More importantly, the two women consulted one another and formulated plans to deal with any crisis that might arise out of Julian's po liti cal situation.

"Do you know very much about Mediterranean France?" Calyxa asked me with a certain affected casualness, one September night as we lay in bed.

"Only that Mitteleuropa claims it as a Territory, while it insists it's an Inde pen dent Republic."

"The weather there is very clement, and Mediterranean France has cordial relations with other parts of the world."

"I expect that's so ... what about it?"

"Nothing at all, except that we may have to live there one day."

I didn't dismiss her assertion out of hand. In fact we had discussed the possibility several times before. In the event of a disaster, such as the collapse of Julian's presidency and the ascension to the Executive of hostile agencies, all of us (including Julian) might need to flee the country.