Julian Comstock: A Story of 22-nd Century America

1

I was hastily introduced to Julian’s mother as a friend from the Army, and Calyxa as my wife, and then we adjourned (at Mrs. Comstock’s insistence) to a luxurious carriage, big enough to contain all five of us. A team of fine white horses carried us away from the noise and confusion of the rail station.

The upholstery of the carriage was lush, the city outside was astonishing… but I was hardly conscious of any of those things. In fact I was in a stricken state. I did not yet fully understand the mechanism by which this unwelcome Welcome had worked out; but I was already convinced that I had upset the plans, and perhaps hastened the doom, of my friend Julian.

Calyxa was even more bewildered by this turn of events, for which her experience supplied no antecedent or explanation. The carriage might have been silent, each of us dwelling on private thoughts and fears, but for Calyxa’s periodic demands to be “let in on the joke.”

“I wish I could oblige you, Mrs. Hazzard,” said Julian’s mother, who had succeeded in committing our names to memory despite the chaotic conditions under which we were introduced. “But I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

In fact Mrs. Comstock was exhibiting an admirable degree of level-headedness, as I saw it. She was a solidly-built woman of middle age, her coifed brown hair streaked at the temples with white. She occupied a central carriage-seat. Julian brooded to her left, while Sam on her right looked pale and stricken (except when he glanced at Mrs. Comstock, which action caused a ferocious blush to rise to his cheeks).

“Excuse me,” Calyxa said, “and probably this question violates some etiquette I haven’t been warned about, but who are you exactly ?”

“Emily Baines Comstock,” the older woman said gamely. “Julian’s female parent, if you haven’t inferred that fact already.”

“The name ‘Comstock’ comes as a surprise,” Calyxa said, casting me a sour glance.

I immediately confessed that I had deceived her about Julian’s pedigree. I apologized but cited my promise to Julian and Sam.

“I thought you were a Western lease-boy, Adam.”

“I am! Nothing less, nothing more! I was befriended by Julian Comstock when he was sent to Williams Ford to protect him from possible conspiracies.”

“Comstock,” Calyxa repeated. “Conspiracies.”

Julian roused from his brooding silence and said, “It’s true, Calyxa, and it isn’t Adam’s fault he didn’t tell you before now. I had hoped to remain a ‘Commongold’ for many more years to come. But the pretense is all blown up. The President’s my uncle, yes, and he isn’t charitably disposed toward me.”

“And now that your identity has been revealed?”

“News of the scene at the rail station is bound to circulate quickly, the city being what it is…”

“And will your uncle try to kill you, then?”

Mrs. Comstock stiffened at these blunt words, but Julian just smiled sadly.

“I expect so,” he said.

“Murderous relatives are a curse,” nodded Calyxa, who considered herself knowledgeable in these matters. “You have my sympathy, Julian.”

The plush carriage followed a street I would later learn to call Broadway, then turned aside into a fashionable district of antique houses with stone facades, either original or built up from authentic remains. I looked about as we dismounted, and everything I saw—a tree-lined street, gardens blooming with spring flowers, glass windows of gemlike clarity, etc.—spoke of Aristocracy and Ownership, and not timidly, but boastfully. Up a flight of stairs into the reception-room of the great house, then, where a small army of servants greeted the returning Mrs. Comstock and gaped at her son. Mrs. Comstock clapped her hands and said brusquely, “We have guests—rooms for Mr. and Mrs. Hazzard and Mr. Godwin, please, and if Julian’s quarters are not in order they must be brought up to acceptable conditions. But only for the night. Tomorrow we remove to Edenvale.”

I looked questioningly at Julian, who told me in a low voice that Edenvale was the family’s country Estate, located up the Hudson River.

Some of the servants began to welcome Julian personally. They seemed to remember him warmly from earlier times, and were astonished at his arrival, since (as I later learned) rumors of his death had been circulating freely. Julian smiled to see these old acquaintances; but Mrs. Comstock was impatient, and clapped the servants to their chores, and we adjourned to an enormous parlor. A girl in a white apron brought us iced drinks. I supposed this sort of hospitality was common among Aristos, and I tried to accept it as if I were accustomed to it, though such luxury exceeded anything in my experience, including what I had seen in the houses of the Duncan and Crowley families at Williams Ford—rustic retreats by comparison with the excesses and indulgences of Manhattan, if this was an example.

Calyxa, meanwhile, regarded it all with a painfully visible skepticism, and looked at the servant girl as if she wanted to indoctrinate her into Parmentierism, a project I hoped she would not undertake.

“I think I understand the outline of the misfortune,” Julian said as we settled into the depths of our prodigiously-upholstered chairs. “Somehow the story of my experience in the war has been circulated in the city… though I don’t know how that could have come about.”

I gritted my teeth but said nothing. I couldn’t, until my suspicions were confirmed.

“You’ve been in the papers,” Mrs. Comstock acknowledged. “Under your assumed name.”

“Have I?”

Mrs. Comstock summoned the servant girl again. “Barbara, you know I banned cheap journals from the house.…”

“Oh, yes,” said Barbara.

“And I know that the ban isn’t universally observed. Please don’t deny it—we don’t have time. Go down to the kitchen and see if you can find anything sufficiently degraded on the subject of ‘Julian Commongold.’ Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes! The cook reads them out loud to us,” Barbara said, then blushed at the admission, and hurried off to find the papers.

She came back with a weeks-old copy of the Spark and a crudely bound pamphlet. These specimens of urban journalism were passed among us to inspect.

The Spark contained “the latest intelligence from the Saguenay front, including the capture of a Chinese Cannon!” This proved to be a truncated account of Julian’s bravery at Chicoutimi , printed under the byline of Theodore Dornwood, “the Spark’s famous front-line correspondent in the Saguenay Campaign.”

Worse than this was the pamphlet, nearly a small book, which had been printed as a compilation of Mr. Dornwood’s reporting, under the title The Adventures of Captain Commongold, Youthful Hero of the Saguenay.

It was selling briskly on all the better street-corners, the servant girl said.

Julian and Sam explained to Mrs. Comstock that Dornwood was a scoundrel who had debauched himself in Montreal all during the Campaign, and who made up his stories out of rumor and whole cloth.

But I looked into the pamphlet with careful attention, and my humiliation was complete. I confessed at once—I could do nothing else. “It’s Dornwood’s signature,” I said haltingly. “But the words… well… the words are mainly my own.”

They say it’s a pleasant experience for any aspiring writer to see his work set in print for the first time. This occasion was an exception to that rule.

The pamphlet’s paper cover featured an engraved illustration of “Julian Commongold” (rendered as an iron-jawed youth with a piercing gaze and immaculate uniform) astride the fender of a Dutch train-engine, waving an American flag several times larger than the version he had actually employed for the purpose, while a crowd of soldiers cheered at the capture of a supposed Chinese Cannon the size of an iron-mill smokestack. Apparently artists as well as journalists were expected to err on the side of drama, and this one had not stinted in the effort. Mrs. Comstock took the pamphlet from me and held it at arm’s length, an expression of distaste playing about her features.

“Did you actually do these things, Julian?” she asked.

“Some less florid version of them.”

She turned to Sam. “And is this your idea of protecting him from harm?”

Sam looked stricken; but he said, “Julian is a young man with a will of his own, Emily—I mean, Mrs. Comstock—and he doesn’t always yield to suggestion.”

“He could have been killed.”

“He nearly was—several times. If you regard this as a failure on my part, I can hardly contradict you.” He explained the circumstances of our departure from Williams Ford and our unwilling enlistment in the Army of the Laurentians. “I did my best to keep him safe, and here he is intact, despite his recklessness and mine—I say no more.”

“You may continue to call me ‘Emily,’ Sam—we never stood on ceremony. I’m not unhappy with you, only confused and surprised.” She added, “You shaved. You used to wear an admirable beard.”

“I can grow another just as admirable… Emily.”

“Please do so.” She refocused her attention. “Julian, did you have to indulge in such theatrics simply because you found yourself in the Army?”

“I felt as if I did. I was performing my duty, in my mind.”

“But did you have to be so thorough about it? And you, Mr. Hazzard, you claim to have written the words published by this Theodore Dornwood?”

“They were never meant for publication,” I said, blushing down to my hair-roots. “This is as shocking to me as it must be to you. Dornwood pretended to tutor me in the literary art, and I showed him what I imagined were exercises in narrative. He said nothing about publishing them, much less publishing them under his own name. I would have forbidden it, of course.”

“Which of course is why he didn’t ask. Are you really that naive, Mr. Hazzard?”

I could not frame an answer to this humiliating question, though I saw Calyxa nodding vigorously.

“None of this would be a problem,” Sam reminded her, “if the connection between Commongold and Comstock hadn’t been made. What were you doing at the depot, Emily?”

“A favor for the Patriotic Women’s Union. We often greet returning veterans who distinguish themselves on the field of battle. Such ceremonies improve morale among civilians, and the name ‘Comstock’ lends a certain éclat. I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did, but… well, a great deal of time has passed since you and Julian disappeared from the Duncan and Crowley Estate. There was the implication that you might have been killed. I didn’t adopt that repulsive idea, but neither could I completely discount it. When I saw Julian again—well.” She dabbed a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Wholly understandable!” Sam exclaimed. “Don’t blame yourself!”

“Luck was against us. The vulgar papers will be full of this tomorrow. And of course… he’ll hear of it.”

The emphatic pronoun referred to President Deklan Comstock—Deklan Conqueror, as he was also known. A grim silence fell over the gathering.

“At least,” Mrs. Comstock said finally, “we can put some distance between ourselves and the Executive Palace. Edenvale won’t protect us, but it will make things less convenient for Deklan if he decides to act rashly. More than that I cannot do. But let’s not be gloomy. My son is home safely—that’s something to celebrate. Mr. and Mrs. Hazzard, will you join us at our Estate for the next few days?”

I was humbled by Mrs. Comstock’s offer, since I had done nothing to deserve her hospitality and everything to deserve her opprobrium. I was about to decline, when Julian answered for me: “Of course Adam will come. We can hardly set him loose on the streets of the city. He’d be eaten alive.”

Mrs. Comstock nodded. “You’ve been a loyal friend to my son, Adam Hazzard, and it would please me if you traveled with us, especially if Julian can locate some more appropriate clothing for you and your lovely wife. Consider it settled.”

She clapped her hands again. A dozen servants appeared as if from thin air, and the household became a whirlwind of preparation for the journey to the countryside.

Calyxa and I spent a night in one of the guest bedrooms of the Comstock brownstone—as sybaritic an apartment as I had ever inhabited, fitted with a mattress so plush and downy that lying on it was equivalent to lying in it. This might have presented unique opportunities for marital intimacy, [I beg the reader’s pardon.]except that Calyxa was conscious of the movements of servants in the hallway and adjoining rooms, which awareness of interfered with her sense of privacy.

She did note that the bedroom, like the other rooms we had seen, contained a framed photograph of Julian’s father, Bryce Comstock, in a neatly-tailored Major General’s uniform. “He doesn’t much resemble the reigning President,” she observed, “at least the face on the coin.”

The resemblance existed but it was entirely structural: the high cheekbones, the thin lips. In that which animates a face—that is to say, the spectrum of human emotion, apparent even in a photograph—Bryce was the opposite of Deklan. In fact there was much of Julian in him: the same brightness of eye and readiness of smile. “He was the better brother,” I told Calyxa. “Genuinely brave, and not inclined to casual assassination. He was a hero of the Isthmian War before Deklan had him hanged.”

“Heroism is a dangerous profession,” Calyxa observed, correctly.

I slept restlessly and woke as the rest of the household began to stir in the morning. The stars were just disappearing and the air was cool as we assembled ourselves and our luggage into another of Mrs. Comstock’s capacious carriages, and set off with a train of servants for the docks.

Manhattan in a spring dawn! I would have been in awe, if not for the dangers overhanging us. I won’t test the reader’s patience by dwelling on all the wonders that passed my eye that morning; but there were brick buildings four and five stories tall, painted gaudy colors—amazing in their height but dwarfed by the skeletal steel towers for which the city is famed, some of which leaned like tipsy giants where their foundations had been undercut by water. There were wide canals on which freight barges and trash scows were drawn by teams of muscular canal-side horses. There were splendid avenues where wealthy Aristos and ragged wage workers crowded together on wooden sidewalks, next to fetid alleys strewn with waste and the occasional dead animal. There were the combined pungencies of frying food, decaying fish, and open sewers; and all of it was clad in a haze of coal smoke, made roseate by the rising sun. As we approached the docks I saw the masts and stacks of schooners and steamers bobbing against the sky. Our company traveled along a wharf until we came to a steam launch, the Sylvania , which belonged to Mrs. Comstock. It was a small, trim, impeccably whitewashed vessel, gilded in places, and its captain and crew had already brought the boiler up to pressure and were ready to sail.

Before we went on board Mrs. Comstock sent a dock-boy to procure copies of the morning Spark.

The boy returned with a bundle of these journals, and as soon as we had been assigned staterooms and stored our possessions we gathered in the fore-cabin to inspect them.

Our worst fears were quickly confirmed. The front-page headline announced: COMMONGOLD A COMSTOCK!

HEROIC “BOY CAPTAIN ” REVEALED AS NEPHEW OF PRESIDENT.

The byline this time wasn’t Theodore Dornwood’s, but there were several mentions of his Adventures of Captain Commongold, the sales of which would no doubt be redoubled by the news. The story itself was a reasonably accurate account of Julian’s arrival in Manhattan and the warm greeting he received from his mother, not much embroidered with spurious drama. Most disconcerting was a brief note in the tail of the piece to the effect that the Executive Palace had been approached for comment “but has not yet issued a public statement.”

Julian, Sam, and Mrs. Comstock began to discuss the possible ramifications of all this, while Calyxa and I went to the foredeck in a gloomy mood, to distract ourselves with the passing sights. Manhattan with its skeletal towers and relentless commerce had already fallen behind us, but there was evidence of the work of the Secular Ancients on every shore—scavenged ruins as far as the eye could reach, a reminder that human beings in inconceivable numbers had swarmed here during the Efflorescence of Oil. What they had left behind was essentially a Tip of monumental proportions, so expansive that even a century of scavenging had skimmed off only the most accessible deposits of copper, steel, and antiquities. There was testimony to this continuing work on the New Jersey shore, where re-rolling mills and iron foundries vented black smoke into the air. We passed beneath two monstrous bridges—one half-fallen and choked with goosegrass, one still in repair and busy with industrial traffic—while the river itself was alive with barges, steamers, and those oddly-rigged little boats called dahabees which the numerous Egyptian immigrants liked to sail.

Calyxa had dressed herself, under Mrs. Comstock’s tutelage, in the blouse and skirt of a modest Aristo. She wore the clothes unwillingly, but they were becoming to her, although she picked at the belt that cinched her waist as if it were some medieval implement of torture. “This is not exactly how I expected to spend my honeymoon,” she remarked.

I began to apologize, but she waved it off. “It’s all very interesting, Adam, if slightly terrifying. Is Julian really in mortal danger?”

“Almost certainly. His father was killed by Deklan Conqueror as punishment for achieving exactly the sort of notoriety Julian has just acquired. There are limits to what even a President can do, of course—the contending forces of the Army and the Dominion are practical constraints, Sam says—but Deklan is devious and may bide his time until some scheme occurs to him.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

“In strategizing , no—that’s best left to the Aristos, who understand how these things work. In practical matters, Julian knows he can count on us.”

“Much of the blame, of course, lies with this Theodore Dornwood.”

“If there’s any justice he’ll be made to pay for his thievery and lies.”

“Is there, though? Any justice, I mean?”

I took this as a practical rather than a philosophical question. “There will be, if I can help it.”

“You mean you intend to punish him yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, and meant it, though I hadn’t given the prospect much thought. Perhaps Deklan Comstock couldn’t be brought to justice, unless at the Final Judgment; but Theodore Dornwood was no Aristo, and he didn’t live in a walled palace, and it might be within my power to extract some sort of payment from him.

I vowed that I would do so, sooner or later.

2

“Any outdoor game or sport,” Julian said, “to be a sport, ought to have three essential qualities. It should be difficult, it should be impractical, and it should be slightly silly.” His father had taught him that interesting truth, he said.

It was our second week at Edenvale. There had been no word or signal from Deklan Comstock, and the furor in the press had begun to die down for lack of supplemental fuel. Perhaps that engendered a premature sense of security among us.

Certainly Edenvale was a soothing locality. I had never summered at an Aristo’s country Estate, unless you count tending stable for the Duncans and the Crowleys, and I was appalled and seduced by the luxury and laziness of it. Edenvale’s properties were not cultivated, but kept in the wild condition. Trails were maintained for Scenic Strolling or Riding, and the vast acreage of wilderness invited hunting and exploration.

Edenvale House itself sat on an immaculately-tailored lawn bordered with flower gardens. During pleasant weather we took breakfast outdoors, the meal catered to us by servants while we sat at dainty whitewashed tables. On rainy days Calyxa and I explored the seemingly endless rooms of the House, or perched in its library, which was stocked with nineteenth-century classics and Dominion-approved novels of light romance. In the evenings Sam broke out a deck of cards, and we pursued the diversions of Euchre or Red Rose until bedtime; or we adjourned to the music room, where Mrs. Comstock was teaching herself to play Las Ojos Criollos on the piano. [She played earnestly but haltingly, and Calyxa and I often excused ourselves from these sessions. Sam, on the other hand, was made rapturous by her performances, and claimed he could listen to her all night without tiring, though even he seemed grateful when she moved on to such simpler compositions as Ladies of Cairo or Where the Sauquoit Meets the Mohawk.]

In palmier days, Julian explained, the house might have been crowded with visiting Aristos and Owners and Senators and such. But the hanging of Bryce Comstock had cast a shadow over the family, and Mrs. Comstock had been shut out from the elite social circuit. Since then her companions had been drawn from the Manhattan show business crowd, or from the lower ranks of rising wealth; and Edenvale was not the social magnet it once had been.

After two weeks these small entertainments began to pall, and Julian proposed taking me on a tour of the wilder parts of the Estate—the Estate as he had known it as a child, before he was sent to Williams Ford. I readily agreed, and we set out from the house on a sunny, cool morning. Julian carried an unusual piece of luggage with him: a canvas bag, narrow, and about three feet long. I asked him about it; and that was when he quoted his father’s remark about the nature of sport.

“Is it sporting equipment of some kind, then?”

“Yes, but I’ll keep the nature of it to myself for now—I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

We had dressed in clothes not much grander than what we had worn in Williams Ford when we hunted squirrels in the forest; and this was a relief after the complex and constraining Aristo fashions into which we had recently been belted and braced. A breeze turned the leaves of the ailanthus and the birch trees as we walked beneath their overarching branches, and it was as if we had become young again, for a few hours, at least.

In Williams Ford such expeditions always put Julian in a philosophical mood. That hadn’t changed. We paused in a grove of cork trees to refresh ourselves from the canteens we had packed, and Julian said, “This is where I learned to love the past, Adam—as a boy, this was my private Tip.”

“More trees than treasure, as far as I can tell.”

“So it was meant to be. But all this forest has grown up over layers of scuttle from the days of the Secular Ancients. Dig anywhere and you’re bound to unearth an old spoon or button or bone. Over that way”—he pointed at a hillside lush with birch and blackberry—“over that way there are foundations cut into the slope, and the remains of tumble-down houses. Do you know what I found there, as a boy?”

“Beetles? Spiders? Poison ivy?”

“All those; but more importantly—books!”

“You loved books so early, did you?”

“Even when I didn’t know what they meant. The books I found were mostly foul and water-damaged, but here and there a readable page was preserved. I didn’t just read those fragments, Adam, I nearly memorized them. It was a peculiar delicious feeling just to hold them in my hand—as if I’d found a way to eavesdrop on a conversation that faded into the air a hundred years ago.”

“What sort of books were they?”

He shrugged. “Novels, mostly. Stories of intimate relations, or murder, or fantasies of flying to the stars or traveling in time.”

“Not Dominion-approved, of course.”

“No, and therein lay half the pleasure. The fruit was forbidden but it was sweet, even when it surpassed my understanding. What it told me was that the history the Dominion teaches is partial at best. The Dominion’s truth is built on a cracked foundation, and buried in the cracks are things of immense interest and great beauty.”

“Dangerous things,” I said, though I was intrigued by the idea of stories about traveling in time and other such abominations.

“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”

“Are we going to see those ruined buildings, then?”

“Everything valuable I took away from them long ago. No,” Julian said, “today we’re going fishing.”

So saying, he led me another half-mile through a stand of birch and ailanthus to a lake—a glass-flat blue oval in the woods, its banks choked with goosegrass and purple loosestrife. Julian began to unroll his bundle, which I assumed would contain the rods and reels necessary for fly-fishing. But it did not.

We fished from kites, instead.

The kites—a pair of them—were of a design I hadn’t seen before: a wedge of silk with stubby “wings” and a vent in the lower quadrant, supported by three parallel sticks of supple lathing. The kite thus conformed was not rigid, but was what Julian called a “parafoil.” When lofted into the wind it opened like a sail, and was very stable in the air, and did not dip and bob like the crude kites I had made as a child, or fly upside-down, or plummet to the earth without warning. Julian sent his kite aloft first, to give me the idea, though the business wasn’t complicated. Left to itself, the kite was stable enough that it hung in the sky as if riveted there by the gentle breeze. By tugging the string or running the reel Julian could make the kite rise or descend, or travel left and right, according to his will.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Attached to the bridle of each kite was a second string, which carried a cork float and a hook with a tied fly. Thus “kite-fishing.” The kite carried the bait farther from shore than even an expert fly-fisher could have cast it, and fish grew plentifully in those deep and undisturbed waters.

I told Julian the invention was ingenious, but I wasn’t absolutely certain the fish would cooperate in this novel means of persuading them to undertake the journey from their watery home to the frying pan. He nodded and smiled. “You’re right, of course. Which is as it should be. Remember my father’s maxim? A sport, to be a sport, must be difficult, impractical, and slightly silly.”

“I guess this qualifies on all counts, then.”

“But you’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” He stretched out on the mossy bank of the pond, his spine braced against a tree trunk and the kite reel cradled in his lap. Clouds of midges circled lazily over the sunlit lake, while a turtle sunned itself on a nearby rock. “Which is the entire purpose of a sport.”

“These kites are unusual. Where did you learn how to make them?”

“From an antique book—where else?”

“Did the Secular Ancients really bother about such trivial things as kites?”

“Astonishing as it may seem, Adam, the Secular Ancients didn’t spend all their time fornicating outside of wedlock, afflicting the faithful, marrying individuals of the same sex, or terrorizing schoolchildren with the Theory of Evolution. They had their innocent amusements just as we do.”

They were people, that is, as human as Julian or I—a commonplace truth, but one that slips too easily from the mind. “They seem to have been very powerful, and very smart about kites and engines and such things. It’s a surprise to me that they declined so rapidly during the False Tribulation.”

“The False Tribulation—so called, and what an impudence on the part of the Dominion, to name a disaster after their own misinterpretation of it!—wasn’t one event but many. The End of Oil, or more precisely the end of cheaply acquired oil, crippled the Ancients’ top-heavy economic regime. But there were similar crises involving water and arable land. Wars for essential resources expanded, while machine agriculture became more expensive and finally impractical. Hunger stressed national economies to the breaking point, and disease and plague overcame all the hygienic barriers the Ancients had erected against them. Cities that couldn’t support their own populations were inundated by starving peasants and eventually looted by angry mobs. With the Fall of the Cities came the establishment of the first rural Estates and the sale of able-bodied men into indenture. All of this was complicated by the Plague of Infertility that reduced the world’s population so drastically, and from which we’re only now recovering.”

“And so the Ancients were punished for their arrogance. I know—I’ve read the histories, Julian; it’s an old sermon.”

“Punished for the crime of attempted prosperity. Punished for the crime of free intellectual inquiry. Or so the Dominion would have us believe.”

“Perhaps the Dominion histories exaggerate; but surely the Secular Ancients weren’t entirely innocent.”

“Of course they weren’t. Who is? The Ancients suffered under an economic system that resembled nothing so much as a complex elaboration of Private Langers’s Lucky Mug. They were beset by greedy Aristocrats, belligerent Dictators, and ignorant Religionists… as are we, if you haven’t noticed.”

“But aren’t we making progress of our own? Our cities are larger and busier than they have been since the Efflorescence of Oil.”

“Yes, and it might be that we’re on the cusp of a change in our traditional arrangements. The workers are discontented—even some of the indentured are learning to read and to express their grievances. The Dominion still keeps a tight grip in the west, but fights to stifle the Unaffiliated Churches in the east. In politics, the Presidency confronts an increasingly restive Senate, peopled by new-money Owners who distrust the old order or want a bigger piece of it. The Army of the Laurentians and the Army of the Californias function as independent powers, only nominally under the control of the Executive. And so on. The entire system wobbles on its axis, Adam. All it needs is a push in the right direction, and it would collapse.”

“Would that be a good thing?”

“Increasingly, I think it would.”

“People would suffer, though.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t people always suffer? Suffering is unavoidable.”

Perhaps he was right about that. But his nonchalance frightened me. Sam had once accused Julian of “behaving like a Comstock,” in a sense not complimentary to him. This was something worse, it seemed to me. Now he was thinking like a President.

For the rest of the afternoon we set aside Political Philosophy and attended strictly to fishing. The day was as sweet as the sight of two kites bobbing over a sunny blue lake could make it, and if the dividends were unimpressive—Julian snagged a single fish; I did not snag any—we wouldn’t starve for our failures. It was a day that, as boys, we would have enjoyed wholeheartedly. But we weren’t boys, and the pleasant illusion was impossible to sustain. Eventually the sun approached the hilltops of the Hudson highlands, the air grew calm, the long light silvered the leaves of the birches, and we packed up our kites and catch and started back to the Country House.

Edenvale was melancholy in the gloaming. Whether or not it was ever an Eden , just now it seemed more like Eden after the Fall: untenanted, possibly haunted. I found myself wondering whether Julian had disturbed the dead with his loose talk; and I pictured our indignant ancestors emerging from their wormy basements, all charged up with Electricity and Atheism. Despite the absurdity of the idea I was grateful when we passed out of the shadows of the forest and onto the wide lawn of the Estate. Lamplight soft as butter seeped from the windows of the Country House, a welcome sight.

There was also the faint and reassuring sound of music. We reached the house and entered the back hall quietly, so as not to make a disturbance, then followed the sound to the parlor, where Mrs. Comstock sat at the piano striking the familiar chords of Where the Sauquoit Meets the Mohawk.

Sam gazed at her as if lost in admiration; while Calyxa, her coiled hair shimmering in the lamplight, stood with clasped hands, singing:

Sentimental though the song undeniably was—it had been popular in Mrs. Comstock’s youth—its virtue was its melody, which clambered up and down a minor scale as if in sympathy with human hope and mortal resignation. Calyxa seemed to know this, and she gave the melody an appropriate voice, so that the song became a wholehearted lament, sweet as summer love reconsidered in an autumn dusk. It made me think of the fallen condition of Edenvale, and of all the losses Mrs. Comstock had suffered since the death of her husband, and of the threat that hung over her son.

Calyxa performed the song in its entirety. Mrs. Comstock banged out the final chords of the last chorus and sat away from the piano, drained… but Calyxa, to the astonishment of us all, carried on for another two verses without accompaniment. Her fine voice expanded into the dusky stillness, singing:

Long moments passed after the last syllable faded into the air. Mrs. Comstock, obviously moved, wiped her eyes. When she had controlled her emotions, she gave Calyxa a curious look.

“Those verse aren’t in the song-sheet,” she said.

Calyxa nodded and seemed embarrassed. “No, I’m sorry—I added them myself—impulsively.”

“The lyrics are your own?”

“It’s a trick I picked up singing in taverns. Make up a fresh verse, surprise the audience.”

“You invented these lyrics beforehand, or on the fly?”

“They were an improvisation,” she admitted.

“What a remarkable talent! I’m increasingly impressed with you, Calyxa.”

“Likewise, Mrs. Comstock,” Calyxa said. She very nearly blushed—something I had seldom seen her do.

Then Mrs. Comstock cleared her throat. “In any event, the men are back from the woods. Julian, Adam, please sit down. We’ve had a communication from the Executive Palace , and I need to tell you about it.”

Julian whitened, in so far as his naturally pale complexion made that possible. We did as we were told, and seated ourselves.

“Well?” Julian asked. “Which is it—a death sentence or a reprieve?”

Mrs. Comstock was somber but didn’t seem unduly alarmed. “Perhaps a little of both. We’ve been invited to the Independence Day celebration on the Palace grounds. Deklan sent a note claiming he wants to honor the heroism of ‘Captain Commongold,’ now that the Captain is revealed as his nephew.”

“My notoriety protects me,” Julian said in a sneering tone. “At least until the Fourth.”

“I doubt he’ll make an attempt on your life before that date, in any case, and he can hardly slaughter you at the height of the celebration. In the meantime you should issue a statement to the newspapers acknowledging your patrimony and giving credit for your achievements to the Comstock bloodline.”

“And abase myself before that butcher? Shall I defile my father’s grave while I’m at it?”

Mrs. Comstock flinched. Sam said harshly, “These are measures to protect your life, Julian.”

“For what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth a great deal,” Mrs. Comstock said tartly. “To me, Julian, if not to you.”

Julian accepted his mother’s rebuke, and his expression softened. “Very well. We have a few weeks until Independence Day, in any case. And if I’m to live that long, I want to live as a human being, and not a fugitive.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that tomorrow I’m going back to Manhattan.”

Our nervous idyll had ended.

We went aboard the Sylvania the next day. A storm had blown up overnight, and the morning was a cool and rainy one. I spent some time in the Sylvania’s pi lot house, satisfying my curiosity about the principles and techniques of steam navigation. Then I went to the warmer cabin below, where Julian was sitting with a book in his lap.

“The future is on my mind,” I said.

“Should we prove lucky enough to have one, you mean?”

“Don’t joke, Julian. I know the risks we face. But I’m a married man—I have obligations, and I need a plan of my own. Calyxa and I can’t impose on your hospitality forever. When we reach Manhattan I mean to find myself a job—anything short of the meat-packing industry [I had taken to heart Lymon Pugh’s many sermons on that subject.]—and then locate a place where Calyxa and I can live on our own.”

“Well, the thought is nobly intended. But don’t you think you should wait until after Independence Day? You can certainly stay with us until then. You’re no burden on the household, believe me.”

“Thank you, Julian, but why wait? I might miss an opportunity.”

“Or undertake an engagement you won’t be able to keep. Adam… perhaps my mother wasn’t sufficiently explicit about Deklan Comstock’s invitation. When she said we were invited to the Executive Palace , the pronoun included you.”

“What!”

“And Calyxa as well.”

I was appalled, and not a little weak about the knees. “How’s that possible? What does the President want with me? For that matter, how could he know anything about me at all?”

“The President’s men no doubt bribe or threaten the household servants. Walls are transparent to them. Your name and Calyxa’s were explicitly mentioned in the invitation.”

“Julian, I’m just a lease-boy—I don’t know how to behave in the company of a President, much less a murderous one!”

“Probably he won’t have you killed. But he must have learned that you were the true chronicler of my so-called ‘adventures,’ and I suppose he wants to have a look at you. As for your behavior—” He shrugged. “Be yourself. You have nothing to gain by posing, and nothing to lose by revealing your origins. If the President wants to mock me for associating with lease-boys and tavern singers, let him do so.”

This was not a pleasing prospect; but I bit my lip and said nothing.

“Meanwhile,” Julian said, “I owe you a favor.”

“Surely you don’t.”

“I do, though. You befriended me in Williams Ford, and showed me all you knew about that Estate and how to hunt it.”

“And you’ve shown me Edenvale.”

“Edenvale is nothing.

Manhattan, Adam! My town is Manhattan , and I want to instruct you in the perils and the pleasures of it, before you begin life as a working man.”

Perhaps this was meant as a distraction, but I was willing to abandon myself to it, considering how perilous our existence seemed to have become. “Maybe I can learn some of the ways of the Aristos before I’m thrust into their company at the Presidential Palace.”

“That’s right. And the first lesson is not to use the word ‘Aristos.’ ”

“Aristocrats, then.”

“Nor even that. Among ourselves, we’re ‘the Eupatridian Community.’ ”

A label big enough to strangle a man, I thought; but I practiced it dutifully, and after a while it ceased to stick in the throat.

3

The reader, if not versed in recent history, may be anxious to discover whether or not Julian and I were killed on Independence Day. I do not mean to protract the answer to that important question, but the events of the Fourth will make more sense once I have described some of what happened prior to that date.

It was a nervous time for Calyxa and me, though we were newlyweds and tempted to believe in our own immortality. President Comstock was hardly concerned with us, Calyxa said, and in any event we were not locked up in the fine rooms of the Aristocracy. We could pack up our belongings at any time, and travel to Boston or Buffalo , and live there anonymously, beyond the reach of any maddened Chief Executive. I would write books under an assumed name (in this scenario), and Calyxa would sing in respectable cafés. We went so far as to price railway tickets and scrutinize timetables, though I was distressed at the prospect of abandoning Julian to his fate.

“It’s his own fate,” Calyxa said, “and he could shed himself of it if he chose to. He ran away once—can’t he run away again? Ask him to come with us.”

But when I proposed this option to Julian he shook his head. “No, Adam. That’s no longer possible. It was a miracle that I escaped from Williams Ford. Here, I’m under much closer scrutiny.”

“What scrutiny? I don’t see it. New York City is a big locality—big enough to get lost in, it seems to me.”

“My uncle has eyes everywhere. If I so much as packed a bag he’d hear of it. This house is watched, though very discreetly. If I go for a walk, the President’s men aren’t far behind. If I drink to excess in some Broadway tavern, a report will find its way to Deklan Conqueror.”

“And are Calyxa and I also under this observation?”

“Probably, but the surveillance isn’t so strict.” He cast a glance to make sure no servant could overhear us. “If you want to escape, you’re well advised to do so. I won’t stop you or blame you. But it must be a clean escape, or else the President’s men will haul you back and use you against me. To be honest, given your trivial position in Deklan’s eyes, you might be safer here than elsewhere. But the decision is yours, of course.” He added, “I’m sorry you find yourself mixed up in it, Adam. I never meant for it to be so, and I’ll do anything I can to help.”

So Calyxa and I went on studying our railroad timetables, and made airy plans, but failed to pursue them. We continued living in the brownstone house as the days and weeks passed. Mrs. Comstock kept on with her charitable work, and held occasional gatherings of the Manhattan artistic circle, events which Julian enjoyed very much. Sam was often absent during this time, pursuing contacts in the upper echelons of the military—for he was no longer “Sam Samson” but Sam Godwin once again, restored to his reputation as a veteran of the Isthmian War; and I imagined he was performing his own kind of intelligence-gathering, with the aim of discovering the President’s ultimate intentions.

There was no such useful work for me, but I spent many pleasant hours with Calyxa as we adjusted to wedded life. Calyxa in her own way was as philosophically-inclined as Julian, and liked to discuss the flaws and shortcoming of the system of Aristocracy, of which she disapproved. When that palled, we took walks around the city. She enjoyed exploring the shops and restaurants on Broadway or Fifth Avenue ; and on fine days we ventured as far as the great stone walls of the Presidential Palace Grounds. [The grounds of the Executive Palace had once been a great Park, according to Julian, and open to the public; but that had changed when the federal government moved north from Washington.]

The walls were immensely tall and thick, and made of granite fragments salvaged from city ruins. The huge Broadway Gate at 59th Street , with its stone and steel guardhouse, was a work of architecture nearly as impressive as the Montreal Cathedral where I had first spied Calyxa in her surplice, and twice as monolithic. I couldn’t imagine what lay within those moated and forbidding walls (though I was destined to find out).

The month of June was unusually fine and sunny, and we took such walks often. To avoid monotony we varied our route; and we were returning from Broadway by way of Hudson Street when we passed a Manhattan book-store. The sunlight fell aslant through the window glass, revealing the illustrated cover of a book by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton—a volume I hadn’t seen before, called American Sailors Afloat.

Needless to say, I hurried inside.

I had never been in a book-store before. All the books I had read had been borrowed from the Estate library at Williams Ford, or (in the case of A History of Mankind in Space ) dug moldering from ancient Tips. Of course I had known such stores existed, and that Manhattan must include more than a few of them. But I had not gathered up the courage to seek one out. I suppose I had imagined a book-store to be an intimidating place, as airy and marble-pillared as a Greek temple. This store was not such a sacral establishment. Grogan’s Books Music and Cheap Publications was the name of it, and it was no more or less grand than the shoe store to the left of it or the vaccination shop to the right.

Even the smell of the air inside the shop was inviting, a perfume of paper and ink. The books on sale were many and various, and all unfamiliar to me; but I made my way by some instinct to the section where Mr. Easton’s novels were on display—a great plethora of them, fresh and bright in their stamped and colored boards.

“Close your mouth,” Calyxa said, “or you’ll begin to drool.”

“This must be near everything Mr. Easton has published!”

“I hope it is. He seems to have written far too many books already.”

I had been hoarding my back pay from the Army of the Laurentians, grudging every expense—the hope of one day owning a typewriter was still at the back of my mind—but I could not resist buying a volume or two [Four, actually.]of Mr. Easton’s recent work. Calyxa browsed among the sheet music while I counted out Comstock dollars to the cashier.

When we left the store Calyxa lingered a few moments in front of the vaccination shop next door. Calyxa, for all her contempt of the Aristocracy, was not immune to certain aspects of Manhattan fashion. The window of the vaccination shop advertised a newly-arrived Yellow Fever serum, popular with the sort of stylish young city women who sport vaccination scars as if they were jewelry. A single dose of this serum cost more than a dozen novels, however; and Julian had already warned us against such shops, which tended to dispense more diseases than they ever prevented.

In any case my attention was absorbed by the prospect of new Easton books to read. I confessed to Calyxa, as we walked home, how inspiring Mr. Easton’s work had been to me, and how it had formed my ambition to become a professional writer, and how distant that prospect now seemed.

“Nonsense,” Calyxa said. “Adam, you are a professional writer.”

“Not professional—not even published.”

“You’ve written a popular pamphlet already.

The Adventures of Captain Commongold was on sale in Grogan’s, if you didn’t notice. Selling briskly, it appeared to me.”

“That abomination! The piece that imperiled Julian’s life. Horribly mangled by Theodore Dornwood, on top of it all. He murdered half my commas, and misplaced the rest.”

“Punctuation aside, it’s your work, and professional enough that a surprising number of literate Manhattanites are willing to part with a dollar and fifty cents to read it.”

That was true, though I had not thought of it in such a light. My indignation at Mr. Dornwood was rekindled. I escorted Calyxa to the brownstone house of Mrs. Comstock, and said no more about the question, though I privately determined to visit the offices of the Spark and express my grievances there.

I would have preferred to spend that evening reading, for the books I had bought were a novelty to me, and I could not help admiring the crisp pages and unsmudged letters of the freshly-purchased volumes, and the clean white string that bound the signatures snugly together; but Julian insisted on taking Calyxa and me to see a movie—an invitation that was difficult to resist after everything Julian had said about movies back in Williams Ford.

We rode a taxi to the Broadway theater where Julian had reserved our seats, and we mingled in the lobby with a crowd of well-dressed Eupatridians of both sexes. It was clear even before we entered the auditorium that this would be a performance infinitely grander than the recruiting film I had seen in the Dominion Hall in Williams Ford. The movie to be shown here, which was called Eula’s Choice, was advertised with colorful Lobby Posters, which portrayed a female in antiquated dress, and a man with a pistol; also a horse and an American flag. Julian explained that Eula’s Choice was a patriotic story, its debut timed to coincide with the Independence season. He didn’t expect much in the way of refined drama, he said, but the movie had been produced by a local crew known for its extravagant camera-work and lavish stage effects. “It ought to be a fine spectacle,” he said, “if nothing else.”

Calyxa was ill-at-ease among the haughty Eupatridians, and she seemed relieved when a team of ushers appeared to shoo us into the auditorium, where we took our assigned seats. “All the money that changes hands here,” she said, “could feed a thousand orphans.” [Orphans were a common sight on Manhattan streets, where they begged for coins in ingenious and aggressive ways. There was also a generous supply of limbless veterans, their competition.]

“That’s not the way to think of it,” Julian reproved her. “By that reasoning there would be no art at all, nor philosophy, nor books. This is an independent theater, not a Eupatridian institution. The profits pay the salaries of working actors and singers, who would otherwise go hungry.”

“Singers as well as actors? In that case I withdraw the remark.”

The entire theater was powered by an in-house dynamo which thrummed from the basement like a snoring Leviathan. The lights were electric, and they dimmed in unison as the orchestra—a full brass band, with strings—struck up the overture. The curtain rose, revealing a huge white Screen and the veiled booths in which the Voice-Actors and Sound Effects persons worked. As soon as the darkness was complete the beam of the projector threw an ornate title on the screen: THE NEW YORK STAGE AND SCREEN ALLIANCE presents EULA’S CHOICE A Musical Story of Antiquity accompanied by the Dominion Stamp of Approval.

“This ought to be rich,” remarked Calyxa, who had seen movies under less elaborate circumstances in Montreal ; but Julian shushed her, and the music swelled and subsided as the story began.

I won’t describe my astonishment—the reader can take it for granted. I will say that, for once, Julian’s pride in Eastern culture seemed justified and wholly excusable. This was Art, I thought; and on a grand scale!

The story took place at some unspecified time during the Fall of the Cities. The main characters were Boone, the beleaguered pastor of an urban Church; Eula, his fiancé; and Foster, a thrifty industrialist.

The show was divided into three Acts, itemized in a Program Book the ushers had distributed. Each Act featured three songs, or “Arias.”

There was no singing at first, however—only Spectacle, as the audience was treated to flickering scenes of a City of the Secular Ancients in the last stage of its decline. We saw many impossibly tall buildings, artfully constructed of paper and wood, but fully real to the eye; we saw streets crowded with Business Men, Atheists, Harlots, and Automobiles. [The Automobiles were perhaps a less successful artistic effect, as they seemed unusually one-dimensional, and bobbed unconvincingly as they moved; but the dedicated crew of Sound-Makers compensated for this with engine noises created by a baritone growling into a speaking-tube. How these automobiles had survived so long into the End of Oil was a question the film-makers did not address.]

Boone and Eula appeared, working together in Boone’s small pious church, and bantering in a way that suggested their approaching nuptials; but they were interrupted by a troop of Secular Policemen who barged in and accused Boone of speaking such forbidden words as “faith” and “heaven.” These thugs led Boone away to prison, while Eula wept piteously. Boone, as he was dragged through the street in chains, sang the first song, which according to the program was: Aria: The hand of God, not gentle.

The filmed actor was expressive, and he was voiced by a masculine tenor who lent fire and discipline to the lyrics. ( The hand of God, not gentle but just / Descends upon the wicked by and by , and so forth).

If the Secular Policemen by this brutish behavior had earned themselves a place in Hell, their city was already halfway there. We witnessed a montage of strikes, rioting, and fires, the tall buildings beginning to burn as if they had been built of kindling. Now the audience was introduced to Foster, the industrialist, who labored mightily to subdue a fire in his iron mill, which had been set ablaze by unruly workers; but he was forced back by the heat and fallen timbers. Against this backdrop of destruction Foster wiped his sooty brow and sang in resignation the Aria: Gone, all that I have built.

All this was sorrowful enough to melt the hardest cynic’s heart, but it wasn’t finished. Eula appeared once more. She had left the scene of Boone’s cruel arrest, only to find her family home engulfed in flame, and her mother and father crying out from a window from which they could not be rescued. The flames consumed them. Overwhelmed with grief, Eula stumbled on to the jail where she believed Boone had been taken; but that building, too, had burned to the ground.

Several of the Eupatridian ladies in the audience were moved by this tragic scene, and they dabbed their eyes and blew their noses in a manner that distracted from Eula’s excellently performed Aria: Lost and alone among the ruins, which was the conclusion of Act I.

The lights came up for an intermission. Many of the Eupatridians adjourned at once to the lobby; but Calyxa and Julian and I were young and staunch of bladder, and we kept our seats. Images from the film were still vivid in my mind’s eye, and I began to think about the lost wonders of the Secular Ancients. I said to Julian, “The Secular Ancients made movies, didn’t they?—you told me so, I think.”

“Movies too numerous to count, though none survive, unless they’ve been locked away in the Dominion Archives.” The Dominion’s Cultural Committee kept a large stone building in New York City , Julian explained, where it preserved antique texts and documents and other items too blasphemous to be seen by the public. No one outside the licensed clergy knew what treasures it contained.

“And their movies had recorded sound, and color photography?”

“They did.”

“Then why can’t we have such movies? Or at least a larger number of the ones we do make? I don’t understand it, Julian. The simpler technologies of the past are no mystery to us. We may not have bountiful supplies of oil, but we can burn coal to much the same effect.”

“We could make movies with recorded sound,” Julian said, “but the resources haven’t been allotted that way. The same is true of that typewriter by which Theodore Dornwood seduced your services. We could build a typewriter for every human being in Manhattan if we liked; but it would be a reckless expenditure of iron or rubber or whatever they make typewriters out of—materials the Senate assigns to Eupatridian manufacturers, who in turn supply the military with weapons and other necessities.”

I had not thought of it in those terms. I supposed every Trench Sweeper in Labrador could be considered a typewriter not manufactured or a movie not produced. A painful bargain, but what patriot could disagree with it?

“An artist,” Julian said, “or a small manufacturer or shopkeeper, has to make do with whatever resources trickle down as surplus from above, or with second-pickings from some local Tip. The justice of this is debatable, of course.” He turned to Calyxa. “What do you think of the film so far?”

“As drama?” She rolled her eyes scornfully. “And the songs—excuse me, the arias —are simple-minded. The female singer is good, though. A little flat in the upper registers, but bold and fluent overall.”

I politely disagreed with her about the quality of the drama; but what she said about the music amounted to high praise, for Calyxa dispensed her approval grudgingly at the best of times.

Now the audience filed back into the auditorium and the lights were extinguished for Act II. The production resumed with yet another Spectacle: hundreds of ragged men and women fleeing the Fall of the Cities, set to a mournful trumpet eulogy and the rhythm of tramping feet. Among these individuals was the convicted pastor Boone, who (unknown to Eula) had escaped ahead of the flames. In one touching scene he came across his former captors, the brutal Secular Policemen, now starving and suffering from burns; and despite their sins against him he helped them renounce their apostasy, and led them to redemption in the moment of their deaths. Rising tear-streaked from this sacred task, Boone spotted a distant Banner of the Cross among the plodding refugees. He recognized it as a symbol of the nascent Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth—a union of all the Persecuted Churches—and he marked the event by singing his Aria: In the wilderness, a flag.

Eula, unknown to Boone, was part of the same mass of vagrant urbanites. When hunger threatened to overcome her she was forced to beg help from Foster, the former industrialist. Foster, traveling in a wagon, explained that he was aiming to reach a certain rural plantation he owned. His behavior toward Eula was impeccably kind and chaste, and although she still loved Boone she believed the pastor had been killed in the fire; so she accepted Foster’s gifts with a relatively free heart. Eula’s plaintive second-act song, accompanied by piano rather than full orchestra, was Aria: I will take this offered hand.

Then Foster and Eula—growing ever closer—traveled in Foster’s horse-drawn wagon through a montage of scenes of the degraded world of the False Tribulation. There were ruined houses, dust-blown farms, starved cattle, fallen Airplanes, rusted Automobiles, and so forth. Eventually, and after arduous adventures, they came to a hilltop town not far from the rural property Foster owned. This town had survived the Fall of the Cities intact, and was protected by the steadfast Christianity of its population. The inhabitants had erected a huge symbol of their faith at the highest point of land, prompting Foster’s Aria: What shines on that far hill? A cross!

The Act concluded with Eula’s astonished glimpse of one of the many clerics who had assembled in this virtuous town to join in the work of defending its piety: none other than Boone, her former intended husband.

The curtain closed on this breathless discovery.

This time the three of us adjourned to the lobby during the intermission. While attending to human necessity I discovered yet another of the unanticipated luxuries of the Eupatridian class: indoor plumbing so immaculate that the enameled receptacles for gentlemen gleamed as if freshly polished, and were scented with lemon. Amazing, what subtle easements human ingenuity can contrive!

I made my way back to my seat in time for Act III.

Act III was that portion of the movie in which a Choice, prominent in the title, was set before poor Eula. That would provide great opportunities for the actresses portraying her (both voice and on film) to exert themselves; but first we saw Foster facing a dilemma of his own. His plantation, not far from the pious town where he and Eula had taken refuge, was in a shambles. The wheat crop had been trampled by hungry refugees, and what remained could not be harvested for lack of help. Meanwhile refugees crowded into town on a daily basis, hoping to be fed. Clearly the solution was to use landless vagrants as field-hands—but he couldn’t hire any, in the classic sense, because he had no money with which to pay them. In any case farm work (which guaranteed a daily meal) was so desirable that the mob would have fought for it. Therefore Foster worked out an ingenious solution: Aria: All that may be sold generosity may buy, he sang, accepting pledges of lifelong indenture from men willing to forego daily wages. [A pledge alone secures the deed / Your labor’s mine, while I fulfill your need , etc. If there was any haggling over this bargain, the film did not depict it.]

To enforce the arrangement, and to make a success of it, he required the assistance of the clergy in general, and Pastor Boone in particular.

Thus Eula was treated to the sight of her contending suitors united in the creation of that new and more pious America which would grow from the ruins of the old. Foster was ignorant of Boone’s prior relation to Eula; but Boone was introduced to Eula at a social gathering and recognized her at once. Quickly discerning the nature of her intimacy with Foster, Boone pretended ignorance, [Though only an idiot could have misinterpreted his facial grimaces, which the screen actor portrayed in a broad manner.]and Eula played along. This culminated in a walk by Boone through a moonlit meadow, where he performed his melancholy Aria: I give to God that which the Earth denies, renouncing terrestrial love in favor of the more dependable heavenly variety. Eula, listening from a place among the trees, wept almost as copiously as the ladies in the theater. [The ladies were not pleased with certain Broadway sophisticates also present, whose cries of “That’s right—keep single if you can help it!” were quickly suppressed.]

Foster proposed to her in a scene of the following day. Eula did not accept his proposal at once, but went to see Boone for advice. She approached him as a penitent to a pastor—neither of them acknowledging their prior acquaintance, though both were painfully conscious of it—and told him the story of everything that had happened to her since the Fall of the Cities, culminating in Foster’s proposal. She had seen her former betrothed, she said, whom she had believed dead; and she still loved him authentically; but she loved Foster as well, and her mind was all in a confusion.

Boone, overcome with feeling, eventually spoke. “Many things have changed since the end of the old world,” he said, the voice actor giving this speech all the quirks and quavers of suppressed emotion while synchronizing his words precisely with the vocal movements of the actor on the screen. “We’re embarked on a new relationship with the sacred. It’s the twilight of an old way of life, and the dawn of a new. Vows from prior times are not broken but annulled. Your marriage if you make it will surely be blessed—[a long choked pause]—despite, despite what came before.”

Eula turned her brimming eyes to his. “Thank you, Pastor,” she said; and if she said anything else it was drowned out by the sniffling in the audience.

Eula’s return to Foster was bittersweet. She accepted his attentions with an Aria: I pledge to thee, followed by scenes of a spectacular Wedding, with many poignant glances cast between Eula and the noble Pastor, and at last a lengthy Ensemble/Medley:The hand of God, not gentleWhat shines on that far hill?I pledge to thee, the cast being joined by a Chorus, with much ringing of bells, and exclamations by the trumpet section, and a triumphant final refrain over a distant image of that Christian town, its wheatfields plowed by contented indentured folk, and the Sixty Stars and Thirteen Stripes waving optimistically over it all. [An error of history, since the northern states had not yet been acquired at the time of the Fall of the Cities; but forgivable in the name of Art and Patriotism.]

There was protracted applause as the curtain fell. I applauded at least as vigorously as anyone else—perhaps more so. I had not known that the Cinematic Illusion could exist on such an exalted scale, sustained by the painstaking efforts of so many skilled performers working in close concert. It was as much a revelation to me as the plumbing in the Gentlemen’s Room.

We followed the crowd outside. The movie had generated in my mind a sort of Patriotic Glow, which was compounded by the glow of the city. It was the last quarter of the nightly four-hour Illumination of Manhattan, and artificial lights glittered along Broadway like legions of fireflies all in harness. Even the skeletal remains of the antique Sky-Scrapers seemed infused with an electric liveliness. Coaches and taxis passed in great profusion, and scarlet Banners of the Cross, draped from eaves and lintels in anticipation of Independence Day, fluttered in the pleasant breeze. I told Julian how impressed I was, and asked him to forgive me for doubting all his boasts about New York City and the movies.

“Yes, it was a tolerably good show,” he said, “a very pleasant evening out, all in all.”

“Tolerably good! Are there better?”

“I’ve seen a few that topped it.”

“Good?” Calyxa asked skeptically. “And you notorious for your agnosticism? Pretty as it might be, isn’t Eula an insult to your profoundest beliefs?”

“Thank you for asking,” Julian said, “but no, I don’t feel particularly insulted by it. If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I’m also a realist.”

“There was no realism in the film that I could discern—just a simple-minded version of what they print in the Dominion readers.”

“Well, yes—considered as history it was feeble and propagandistic—but it could hardly be anything else. You saw the Dominion stamp at the beginning of it. No film-maker can proceed without submitting his script to the Dominion’s cultural committees.

Realistically, these matters are exempted from art, since they’re beyond the artist’s control. But in structure, pacing, dialogue, photography, harmony between the screen and the voice performances—everything over which the film-makers did exercise a shaping influence—it was above reproach.”

“Above reproach, then,” Calyxa said, “in everything except what matters.”

“Do you mean to say the singing didn’t matter?”

“Well… the singing was fine, admittedly… and the singers didn’t write the script…”

“My point exactly.”

“So it was a beautiful, stupid thing. Wouldn’t it be even more beautiful if it were slightly less stupid?”

“I don’t disagree. I would love to make a movie that wasn’t just beautiful but also thoughtful and true. I’ve thought about it often. But the world isn’t rigged to allow such a thing. I doubt anyone on Earth has the power to overrule the Dominion in these matters, except possibly the President himself.” Then Julian, as if startled by his own thought, blinked and smiled. “Of course that’s not something we can expect of Deklan Comstock.”

“No,” Calyxa said, searching his face. “No, certainly not of Deklan Comstock.”

Come morning I let Calyxa sleep late, and took myself off to visit the publisher of the Spark and of The Adventures of Captain Commongold, Youthful Hero of the Saguenay.

I was equipped with nothing more lethal than my smoldering indignation, fueled by the scenes of courage and sacrifice I had witnessed in the movie the night before. I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don’t know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.

My first trial was in finding the office I wanted. I had no trouble locating the building in which the Spark was published, since its address was printed in every issue: it turned out to be a vast stonepile near the Lexington Canal. Most of its huge space was devoted to printing, binding, warehousing, and distributing the company’s papers and pamphlets, however, and I was reduced to asking my way of a grimy press-operator who told me, “Oh, you want Editorial.”

“Editorial” was a suite of rooms at the top of a flight of stairs on the fourth floor. All the heat of the building (and it was a warm June day) had collected in that airless warren, and so had the smells of ink and solvent and machine oil. I did not know precisely to whom I ought to speak, but further inquiries led me to the door of the Editor and Publisher, a man named John Hungerford. Apparently Mr. Hungerford wasn’t accustomed to meeting visitors who hadn’t scheduled appointments; but I was firm in my entreaties to his secretary, and eventually I was allowed into his office.

Hungerford sat behind an oaken desk, in one of the few rooms on the floor that possessed an open window, though it looked out on a brick wall. He was a man of fifty years or thereabout, stern and peremptory in his manner. He asked without preamble what I wanted from him.

I said I was a writer. I had hardly pronounced that word when he interrupted me: “I can’t give you a job, if that’s what you want. We have all the writers we need—they’re thick on the ground at the moment.”

“It’s not a job I want, it’s justice! I’m a sorry to say that a man connected with your firm has robbed me, and he has done it with your collaboration.”

That silenced him for a moment. His eyebrows inched up, and he looked me over. “What’s your name, son?”

“Adam Hazzard.”

“Means nothing to me.”

“I don’t expect it would. But the thief is Mr. Theodore Dornwood—maybe you know that name.”

He evinced less surprise than I expected. “And what do you claim Dornwood stole from you? A watch, a wallet, a woman’s affections?”

“Words. Twenty thousand of them, roughly.” I had made an estimate of the length in words of The Adventures of Julian Commongold.

A word is a small thing; but twenty thousand of anything is a ponderable number. “May I explain?”

“Be my guest.”

I told him the story of the work I had done for Dornwood in Montreal , and what Dornwood in turn had done with my work.

Mr. Hungerford said nothing but asked his secretary to send for Dornwood, who apparently had an office in the building. In a moment or two that villain arrived.

Dornwood in Manhattan was not quite the hemp-scented drunkard I had last espied near Montreal. The success of Captain Commongold had improved his clothing, his tonsure, and his skin tone. Unfortunately it also seemed to have damaged his memory. He looked at me blankly, or pretended to, until Mr. Hungerford made an introduction.

“Oh, yes!—Mr. Hazzard— Private Hazzard, wasn’t it? I’m pleased to see you survived your tour of duty. I’m sorry I didn’t know you out of uniform.”

“Well, I know you,” I said, “uniform or not.”

“This young man has a grievance against you,” Hungerford said, and he proceeded to repeat in fair detail what I had told him. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Theodore Dornwood shrugged and looked vaguely hurt. “Well, what can I say? I suppose there’s some truth in it. I do recall Private Hazzard coming to me for lessons in writing. And I did agree to peruse a few pages for him.”

“You admit it!” I cried.

“Admit to consulting you, yes. I think you misunderstand the nature of journalism, Private Hazzard. But I don’t blame you, for a boreal lease-boy could hardly know any better. A journalist draws on many sources. You and I talked about Julian Commongold, yes—you may even have shown me some written notes—but I discussed the subject with a great number of infantrymen and officers, of which you were only one. In so far as I did employ your notes as a partial source (and I admit I may have), it was in exchange for my advice on writing… such advice as I could supply to a poorly-schooled Westerner. No formal bargain existed, of course; but if ever there was an informal one, surely it was fulfilled.”

I stared at him. “I made no bargain at all!”

Mr. Hungerford looked up sharply from his desk. “If you made no bargain, Mr. Hazzard, then there was no bargain to be broken, was there? I’m afraid Mr. Dornwood has the better of you on all counts.”

“Except that every word printed in Captain Commongold is mine, exactly as I wrote it!—apart from the misplacement of the commas.”

Dornwood, who was proving to be a smooth and efficient liar, threw his hands up and gave his employer a beseeching look. “He accuses me of plagiarism. Must I stoop to deny it?”

“Look, Mr. Hazzard,” Hungerford said, “you’re not the first individual to blow in here claiming some pamphlet was based on an idea of his, somehow ‘stolen.’ It happens with every successful piece we publish. I don’t mean to call you a liar—and Dornwood generously admits that he used you as one source among hundreds—but you present no evidence that what you say is true, and every indication that it’s simply a painful misunderstanding on your part.”

“I’m glad you don’t mean to call me a liar, for I’m not one—though you might find one close to hand!”

“See here,” said Dornwood.

“The discussion is closed,” Hungerford said, abruptly standing. “And I want to go to lunch. I’m sorry we can’t do anything to accommodate you, Mr. Hazzard.”

“I don’t want to be accommodated, I want to be paid! I’ll have you before a court, if necessary!”

“So you say. For your sake I hope you won’t pursue the matter. If you insist, you can come back this afternoon and speak to me in the presence of my lawyer. He stops by the office about three o’clock. Perhaps he can convince you the case is hopeless, if I can’t. Goodbye, Mr. Hazzard—you know where the door is.”

Dornwood smiled at me, maddeningly.

I went home disconsolate. Calyxa, as it turned out, had gone off with Mrs. Comstock to buy clothing for the Independence Day celebration at the Executive Palace. Julian—who had stayed out late after the movie, meeting friends among the showpeople and aesthetes of Broadway—had just rolled out of bed. I passed him on the way to the kitchen; he asked me if I had had my breakfast yet.

“Breakfast hours ago, and it’s already late for lunch,” I said irritably.

“Fine—I’d rather eat lunch than breakfast. Why don’t we go out and have a decent meal? No offense to the kitchen staff.”

“I’m not sure but that I wouldn’t rather spend the afternoon reading.”

“Not on a day as fine as this!”

“How would you know what sort of day it is? I’m sure you haven’t even looked out a window yet.”

“The fineness of it seeps under the doors. I smell sunshine. Don’t be a fossil, Adam. Join me for lunch.”

I could hardly resist his invitation without citing the morning’s events, which I preferred to keep to myself. We dined at a restaurant not far distant, which served ox-tongue cobblers and lozenged pork of a refined quality, and I tried to smile and make small talk. But I hardly tasted the food; and I was such glum company that Julian repeatedly asked about my state of mind.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Maybe indigestion.”

“Maybe nothing of the kind. Have you had an argument with Calyxa?”

“No—”

“Are you worried about Independence Day?”

“No—”

“What, then? Come on, Adam, confess.”

He refused to be put off the scent; so I relented, and described my visit to the Spark.

Julian listened to my account without interrupting. Coffee and cakes were produced by an attentive waiter. I ignored them. I could hardly meet Julian’s eyes. But when I finally fell silent and Julian spoke, it was only to say, “The cakes really are excellent, Adam. Try one.”

“I’m not concerned with cakes,” I exclaimed. “Aren’t you going to chide me for my naÏveté, or some such thing?”

“Not at all. I admire what you did. Standing up for yourself, I mean. The justice is all on your side—no doubt about that. The problem lies in your methodology.”

“I don’t know that I have any.”

“Clearly you don’t. I’ll tell you what: Why don’t we go back to Hungerford’s offices this very afternoon, as he suggested?”

I was astonished at the suggestion. “What for? So that he can have his lawyer hang me up and beat the dust out of me?” My threat to take Hungerford to court had been empty. I couldn’t produce any evidence to support my side, and the New York courts had no reputation for impartiality. “I would sooner not, I thank you.”

“This time the outcome might be different.”

“I don’t see how. Hungerford is determined not to admit liability, and Dornwood is a professional liar.”

“Trust me,” Julian said.

This was all very embarrassing, but I could not see my way out of it; and so I made the journey back to Hungerford’s office with Julian at my side.

If Mr. Hungerford was surprised to see me back again, he didn’t let on. He had told the truth about his lawyer. The three of them were sitting together in Hungerford’s office—Hungerford, Theodore Dornwood, and a fat man with greased hair, soon introduced as Buck Lingley, Attorney at Law—when I entered.

Julian, dismayingly, chose to wait in the outer office. He had instructed me to summon him if the publisher didn’t relent.

That seemed an inescapable outcome.

Mr. Hungerford invited me to sit down. Before I could say anything Hungerford’s lawyer asked whether I had proceeded with legal action—filed a complaint, or anything of that sort.

I said I had not.

“Better for you, then,” Lingley said. “You’re swimming in rough waters, Mr. Hazzard. Do you know anything about the legal system?”

“Very little,” I confessed. [I felt I had nothing to lose by honesty—nor much to gain, come down to it.]

“Do you understand what it would cost you to bring a legal action against this business, or against Mr. Dornwood as an individual? And do you understand that it would cost double that once the case was thrown out of court, as I assure you it would be? It’s not a trifling thing to impugn the integrity of such men as these.”

“They impugn themselves, it seems to me. But I’m sure you’re right.”

Lawyer Lingley looked briefly puzzled. “You mean to say you’ll quit your claim?”

“I expect that phrase has some legalistic significance of which I’m not aware. What happened, happened—neither you nor I can change that, Mr. Lingley. And if the courts don’t judge in this matter, Heaven might not be so lax.”

“Heaven isn’t within my jurisdiction. If you’re willing to be reasonable, I’ve prepared a paper for you to sign.”

“A paper saying what?”

“That you have no fiscal claim on this company or Mr. Dornwood, no matter whether some small amount of material you wrote found its way into Dornwood’s published accounts.”

“It was not a ‘small amount,’ Mr. Lingley. We’re talking about an act of thievery bold enough to make a vulture blush.”

“Make up your mind,” Lingley said. “Do you want to settle the matter, or are you going to persist in these libels?”

I looked at the paper. It was, in so far as I could decipher the whereases, a renunciation of all my prior complaints. In exchange, it said, the company would not pursue me for “defamation.”

There was a space prepared for my signature.

“If I sign this,” I said slowly, “I suppose I’ll need a witness?”

“My secretary will witness it.”

“No need—I’ve brought a witness of my own,” and I gestured through the door for Julian to enter.

Hungerford and the lawyer blinked at this unexpected development. If they did not recognize Julian Comstock, Theodore Dornwood certainly did. He sat bolt upright, and an unprintable word escaped his lips.

“What’s this about?” Hungerford demanded. “Who is this man?”

“Julian Comstock,” I said. “Julian, this is Mr. Hungerford, the publisher of the Spark.”

Julian offered his hand. Hungerford took it, though every other part of him seemed frozen in shock.

“And this is Mr. Hungerford’s lawyer, Mr. Buck Lingley.”

“Hello, Mr. Lingley,” said Julian in an amiable tone.

Lingley’s complexion, which up to that moment had been florid, turned the color of an eggshell, and his tendentious manner went the way of the morning dew. He did not speak. Instead he reached across the desk and picked up the paper I was meant to sign. He folded it in thirds and tore it in two pieces. Then he pursed his lips in a sickly imitation of a smile. “I’m delighted—no—honored—to meet you, Captain Comstock. Unfortunately an urgent appointment calls me away—I cannot linger.” He turned to Hungerford. “I think our business is finished for today, John,” he said, and left the room in such a hurry that I was surprised the breeze didn’t pull the door shut after him.

Mr. Hungerford had yet to close his slackened jaw.

“And I recognize Theodore Dornwood,” Julian said, “our regiment’s civilian scribe. I’ve read some of your work, Mr. Dornwood. Or at least the work that was published under your name.”

“Yes!” Dornwood said in a strangled voice, which was not helpful. “No!”

“Shut up, Theo,” Mr. Hungerford said. “Captain Comstock, do you have a contribution to make to this discussion?”

“Not at all. It was only that my friend Adam seems to be having a hard time making himself understood.”

“I think we’ve overcome that difficulty,” Hungerford said. “As a responsible publisher I mean to correct any mistake that finds its way into print. Naturally I’m astonished to discover that Mr. Dornwood borrowed another man’s work without attribution. That error will be corrected.”

“Corrected in what way?” Julian inquired, before Dornwood could stammer out some version of the same question.

“We’ll print a notice in tomorrow’s Spark.”

“A notice! Excellent,” said Julian. “Still, there’s the matter of the thousands of pamphlets that have already been distributed under Mr. Dornwood’s name. If some profit or royalty has been paid to Mr. Dornwood by mistake—”

“Sir, there’s no problem in that department. I’ll have our accountants calculate the full amount and pay it to you directly.”

“To Mr. Hazzard, you mean.”

“I mean, of course, to Mr. Hazzard.”

“Well, that shows a Christian spirit,” said Julian. “Doesn’t it, Adam?”

“It’s almost contrite,” I said, not a little astonished myself.

“But it seems to me,” Julian went on, “though I’m no expert on the publishing business, you might be missing an opportunity, Mr. Hungerford, and a lucrative one, at that.”

“Please explain,” Hungerford said warily, while Dornwood cringed in his chair like a spanked child.

“We’ve established that Adam was the true author of The Adventures of Captain Commongold.

Was it well-written, do you think?”

“The public has taken to it in a big way. We’ve gone into a third printing. That makes it well-written, by my definition. You say it was all your work, Mr. Hazzard?”

“All but the punctuation,” I said, glaring at Dornwood.

“Does that suggest anything to you, as a publisher?” Julian asked. “Adam is too modest to mention it, but he’s written more than just these matter-of-fact Adventures.

He has a novel in progress. Your press prints novels as well as newspapers, doesn’t it, Mr. Hungerford?”

“We have a modest line of bound thrillers.”

Julian asked me if my novel could be considered “thrilling.”

“It has pirates in it,” I said.

“There you are, then! Adam is a proven best-seller, and he’s writing a book with pirates and other exciting persons in it—and here he is standing in your office!”

“I’ll have a contract drawn up,” Hungerford murmured.

“Mr. Hungerford is a canny businessman, Adam. He wants to publish your novel. Will the terms be generous, Mr. Hungerford?”

Hungerford quoted a colossal number, which he said was his standard rate for first-time novelists. I was quite taken aback, and probably turned as white in the face as Lawyer Lingley had when he recognized the President’s nephew. I could not speak. My toes and fingers were numb.

“Good,” Julian said. “But is Adam really a first-time novelist?—given the success of his previous work, I mean.”

Hungerford nodded woodenly and announced a number twice as cosmic. I might have fainted, if I had not had the desk to lean on.

“Is the number acceptable, Adam?”

I allowed that it was.

“As for Mr. Dornwood—” Julian began.

“He’ll be fired immediately,” Hungerford said.

“Please don’t do that! I’m sure Adam doesn’t want to punish Mr. Dornwood any further, now that the error had been corrected.”

“I guess that’s right,” I managed to say. “I won’t hold a grudge against any man. You can keep your job, Dornwood, for all of me. Although—”

Dornwood gave me a pleading look. He was no longer the smug Manhattanite. He might have been some condemned slave kneeling before a Pharaoh for clemency. It was an unusual sensation to hold another man’s fate in my hands. I could ask for his apology, I supposed. I supposed I could ask for his head, too, and Hungerford would have it delivered it to me on a china plate. But I’m not a vindictive person.

“I want your typewriter,” I said.

They say the typewriter was invented in 1870 or thereabouts. It has had many incarnations in the centuries since. It went out of production even before the End of Oil, and was re-introduced only recently. Modern typewriters are made by hand, by craftsmen who have studied innumerable rusty remains rescued from various Tips. They are expensive to buy, and costly to maintain. They’re also very heavy. Julian and I took turns carrying Dornwood’s typewriter down the street to a taxi stand.

“Say something,” Julian suggested, “or I’ll think you’ve lost your tongue.”

“I’m out of words entirely.”

“Unfortunate condition for a writer to be in.”

That brought me up short.

Was I a writer, in the professional sense? I guessed I was. Hungerford and his lawyer had meant for me to sign a quit-claim this afternoon. Instead I had signed a contract to write a novel, and inked my name on a receipt for Theodore Dornwood’s writing machine. Probably those two items, the contract and the typewriter, were acceptable bona fides in the author’s trade.

I said to Julian, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Do what?”

“What you did at the Spark. Command obedience. Hungerford practically bowed to you.”

As long as I had known Julian I had known he was an Aristo. And I knew Aristos were meant to be respected and obeyed. But we had ignored that dictum as boys, and been forced to ignore it as soldiers, and agreed to ignore it as friends, and it was seldom topmost in my mind. I reminded myself that to a stranger, even a highly-placed businessman such as Mr. Hungerford, Julian was no more or less than a member of the family of the reigning President. No doubt Hungerford imagined that a word from Julian to his uncle would cause the Spark to be shut down and placed under a permanent Dominion sanction. That was the kind of power Deklan Conqueror was able to exercise.

By implication—at least in the mind of Hungerford and his lawyer—it was Julian’s power as well.

“It’s a handy thing,” Julian said as we maneuvered first the typewriter and then ourselves into an available cab, “to invoke the family name now and then.”

“It must be daunting to possess such power, and to wield it.”

“The power is all Deklan’s, I’m afraid.”

“Perhaps not all. You borrowed a little of it just now.”

“I don’t want it. The thought of it sickens me. The power to do good—that’s the power I’d like to wield,” said Julian.

“Anyone can do good in the world, Julian, to some degree.” Or so my mother had often told me, and the Dominion Reader for Young Persons concurred.

“The kind of good I want to do requires the kind of power few men possess.”

“What kind of good is it, that wants such muscle?”

But Julian wouldn’t answer.

Calyxa wasn’t impressed by the typewriter. She pointed out all its dents and scars—which were many, for the machine had been carried to Labrador and back at least once, and had seen hard service under Dornwood. It still smelled a little of liquor and burnt hemp. But it was serviceable and well-oiled, and did its job uncomplainingly.

Calyxa also reminded me that I didn’t know how to type. There was a skill associated with it. I could find letters and poke them, but this was a relatively laborious way to conduct business. She told me she had seen a booklet at Grogan’s called Typewriting Self-Taught, and I promised her I would buy myself a copy, even if it cost as much as a Charles Curtis Easton novel.

If she was cynical about the typewriter, she was genuinely pleased by the news that I had signed a contract for my novel, and that Dornwood’s royalties for Julian Commongold had been consigned to me. We would have money of our own, in other words, and there was the solid promise of more to come.

“So we won’t be running off to Buffalo ,” she said.

“We can support ourselves in New York City. You can sing in cafés or not, as the mood suits you.”

“Assuming we survive the Independence Day festivities at the Executive Palace.”

I wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “Julian’s almost certain no harm will come to us there.”

“Almost certain,” she said. “That’s almost reassuring.”

There was a sound like gunfire in the street that night.

I rose and went to the bedroom window. The window had been left open in order to soften the heat in the upper stories of the house, though barely a breeze was blowing.

I put my head outside. Manhattan lay quiet in the midnight darkness. I could hear the rustling of draped flags and the creek of insects. The bones of Sky-Scrapers cut angular silhouettes out of the stars, and here and there the fulgent glow of distant foundries smoldered. Down below, in the stables attached to the house, a sleepless horse snuffled and tapped its shod hoof on the ground.

More explosions followed, and the sound of stifled laughter. A crew of five or six boys dashed out between two of the row houses, lit punks glowing in their hands. Offended voices hailed them from other windows.

What I had taken for gunshots was only the sound of exploding fire-crackers, tossed about by mischievous children in anticipation of the Fourth of July. Julian and I had played the same kind of tricks back in Williams Ford in our younger days. The dairymen had despised us for it, and claimed our concussions dried up the milk in the udders of their cows.

I couldn’t bring myself to be angry.

The smell of black powder came in with the night air. Calyxa stirred and asked sleepily whether something was burning. “Smells like the whole town’s on fire,” she murmured.

“Just mischief,” I told her.

I shivered, though the night was warm. Then I shuttered the window and went back to bed.

4

In the days before the Fourth of July I wrote up a special Introduction to the revised edition of The Adventures of Captain Commongold (Now Revealed as Julian Comstock), the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay , and replaced all the commas Mr. Theodore Dornwood had deleted or misplaced. In the matter of the Introduction I accepted the tutelage of Sam Godwin, who said it was very important that I should not insult the reigning President, but rather say something to praise him.

I didn’t like to do this. After everything Julian had said about his uncle, it felt like hypocrisy. I told Sam so.

“It is hypocrisy. A lie, frankly. But it’s for Julian’s sake. It may save his life, or at least prolong it.”

I could hardly refuse, then, for this was the same document that had imperiled Julian in the first place, and I was not sorry if it could be made to serve the opposite purpose. So I wrote down that Julian had joined the Army of the Laurentians under an assumed name “so that he would not receive any special treatment that might otherwise accrue to a President’s nephew, but would be treated as an ordinary soldier of the line.” Not that Deklan Comstock would ever stoop to influencing the military to obtain a better position for Julian: “The President no doubt believes, as Julian does, that a man must distinguish himself on his own hook, and for his own behavior, and no one else’s. It was Julian’s fear that some commissioned officer might attempt to curry favor through favoritism; and his pride and patriotism would not allow him to accept any such unearned privilege.” Julian, I wrote, wanted to achieve the condition of heroism, if he achieved it at all, “as Deklan Conqueror had: on his own behalf, and without any softening help.”

Julian winced when he read this, and told me I ought to work for the Dominion, since I was so facile with a flattering lie; but Sam rebuked him and explained that I had included the passage at his insistence.

“I’ve been spending time with Army officers on leave from the Laurentians,” Sam said. “In the high ranks, particularly the men around General Galligasken, there is considerable discontent with Deklan Comstock. The President attempts to rule the Army like a tyrant, and orders peculiar attacks and strategies of his own contriving; and when these fail—as they almost inevitably do—he punishes some hapless Major General, or appoints a more servile one in his place. Unfortunately our success at Chicoutimi isn’t typical of the general progress of the War. The Army of the Laurentians can’t continue to sustain losses at the current rate—the President will have to recall veterans, or whip up a new draft, if he wants to prevent a complete collapse.

I tell you this in utmost confidence: if we can placate Deklan Conqueror, even temporarily, we may also outlast him.”

That was unsettling news, even if it had a bright side, but there was nothing I could do about it. Julian accepted it with a nod and a frown.

Later that day I asked Sam whether he had been in contact with any of the Jews of New York City, for there were many of them—I had seen them walking black-suited to their Saturday services, in an enclave near the Egyptian part of town. [At first I thought the immigrant Egyptians might also be Jews, since they worshipped at unusual temples of their own; but this was not the case, Sam said.]

“In Montreal I could afford such associations,” he said. “As Sam Godwin I’m too well known to risk it.”

“What would the risk be? Judaism is legal in this state, isn’t it?”

“Legal but hardly respectable,” said Sam. We were strolling down Broadway, not for the exercise but in order to have a conversation that wouldn’t be overheard by servants. The rattle of carriage wheels, the clatter of horses’ hooves, and the flapping of Independence Day banners made it impossible for anyone to eavesdrop on us—we could barely understand each other.

“What does respectability matter?” Having very little of my own, I was inclined to devalue the commodity.

“It matters not at all to me personally, but a great deal to certain people I deal with. The military, of course. The Dominion, it goes without saying. I can’t do what I have been doing on behalf of Julian if I become known as a practicing Jew. And even in my private life—”

“Do you have one, Sam?” I asked, and immediately regretted the impertinence. He gave me a sour look.

“I hesitate to talk about it. But as a newly married man perhaps you can understand. Years ago—even before the death of Julian’s father—I had the misfortune of falling in love with Mrs. Emily Baines Comstock.”

It wasn’t earth-shaking news. I had seen him blush whenever Mrs. Comstock entered a room; and I had seen her blush, too, in a way that suggested the possibility of mutual affection. Sam was nearly fifty years old, and Mrs. Comstock the same, but I had learned that love can blossom even in the elderly. Still it was shocking to hear him speak of it aloud.

“I know what you’re thinking, Adam—the barriers are insurmountable.”

It wasn’t exactly what I had been thinking, but it would do.

“Nevertheless,” Sam said, “I’ve confided some of my feelings to Emily, and she has hinted that those feelings might be in some measure returned.”

“She told you to grow your beard back,” I observed, “and you did it.”

“Beards don’t come into the matter. This is serious. When Bryce Comstock was alive I kept my affections to myself, and Emily was a devoted wife to a brave soldier, a man for whom my respect was immeasurable and my friendship absolute. But Bryce is gone these several years, and Emily is a widow, and in social eclipse on top of that. The day may come when I can propose a wedding to her. Not until political matters are settled, however—and not at all, if I’m revealed as a Jew.” The Dominion forbade such marriages, and called them unnatural.

“That would make you Julian’s step-father,” I said.

“What else have I been, since Julian was a child, except a second father to him?—though he thinks of me more as a servant, I’m afraid.”

“He’s fonder of you than he can say. He trusts your advice.”

“I don’t deny that I’m of value to him—only that he values me as a useful servant might be valued.”

“More than that!”

“Well, maybe so,” said Sam. “The situation’s murky.”

That was the third day of the month of July, the eve of our visit to the Executive Palace.

Independence Day! What cherished memories of Williams Ford that date provoked, despite all my present anxieties.

It had always been the least solemn of the four Universal Christian Holidays, second only to Christmas in my childish calculations. It was, of course, a profoundly sacred occasion, marked by innumerable services at the Dominion Hall. There had been many public lectures by Ben Kreel about the Christian Nation in which we lived, and the valuable role of the Dominion in all our lives, and such weighty matters as that. But Independence Day also marked the true beginning of summer—summer in its maturity, July and August populating the world with perfume and insects. The creeks that fed the River Pine, though still cold, were available for swimming; squirrels begged to be stalked and shot; peddlers came up from Connaught with fireworks to sell. Best of all, Independence Day drew the Aristos out of their Estate for picnics and celebrations, which meant that my mother, in her role as a seamstress, could sneak into the Estate library and fetch out a book or two for me to read. (These volumes were usually, but not always, returned in good order.) I was prompted by this sentiment to compose a letter to my mother in Williams Ford. Because Julian’s identity had been revealed I could finally write to her openly, and receive mail in return, and I had already sent her several notes—though no response had been received. I sat by the window in the room I shared with Calyxa; there was a small desk there, and I took a sheet of paper from its topmost drawer.

Dear Mother , I wrote.

If my last letter reached you, you will already know that I have survived a year in Labrador—that I did not embarrass myself in battle—that I have married a good woman in a legal Dominion service—and that your daughter-in-law is Calyxa Hazzard (formerly Blake) of Montreal.

Well, all that must be news enough! I have not got any reply just yet, but I hope you will write soon, and communicate your thoughts and Father’s on this exciting subject. Naturally, I hope for and expect your blessing. If Father is disappointed that I did not marry in the Church of Signs , please tell him I’m sorry but that there was no suitable Pastor available.

We are well and doing fine in New York City. In fact I have recently published a Pamphlet (I enclose a copy), and I have been commissioned to write an entire Novel for the same publisher. I seem to have become an author, that is to say, after the style of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton! It is a more lucrative profession than I had expected; and I will send you some money if you tell me how to address it so that it won’t be stolen.

As I write it is the morning of Independence Day, very sunny and pleasant all around, and all over Manhattan church bells are ringing. How is it back in Williams Ford? Does Ben Kreel still talk in the Dominion Hall until nightfall, and are the fireworks still reflected in the waters of the River Pine?

I have said we are well, and that’s true. In fact, because of my friendship with Julian Comstock, Calyxa and I have been invited to the Executive Palace this evening for the annual celebration there! I know you have told me not to mix with Aristos if I can help it—“tempt not contagion by proximity,” as you used to quote to me from the Dominion Reader—but an invitation from the President carries a certain weight, and can’t safely be refused.

In all likelihood nothing untoward will happen at the Palace. The chance that I will be beheaded or disemboweled or any such unpleasant thing is really very slight, although Julian is at a somewhat greater risk. Please do not assume that I have been killed if you do not hear from me—you know how unreliable the mails are!

That is about all for now. Please give my love to Father. Many troubles have come my way since I left Williams Ford, but I am less a child than you remember me, and able to carry myself virtuously through even the most venomous garden, while keeping my eye on the straight and narrow path, and looking neither left nor right, except as necessary to keep from tripping over things.

I signed it, Your loving son, Adam.

In the late afternoon we boarded a carriage—Calyxa, Mrs. Comstock, Sam, Julian, and myself—and set out for the Presidential Palace. It was a nervous journey; but we were brave, and did not speak about the risks and hazards.

The long light cast a golden patina on Broadway, which was dressed up for the occasion with banners and bunting. I was dressed up, too, in a tailored Aristo costume that pinched various tender parts of me, and so was Calyxa, whose elegant mauve-colored dress took up all the space not already filled by Mrs. Comstock’s even bulkier outfit. I was glad to have a seat by the window of the carriage, where I could see past these mounds of compressed silk to the outside world.

We entered the Palace grounds by the Broadway Gate at 59th Street. Our carriage and our invitations were inspected by a black-uniformed member of the President’s private security force, which is called the Republican Guard. Once approved by that dour individual, and carefully watched by a dozen just like him, we passed over the moat and through two heavy iron doors into the manicured grounds of what had once been, according to Julian, a vast Central Park.

Very little remained of the original version of that Park, Julian said, except the great Reservoir in the middle of it. All the wooded areas had been burned over during the False Tribulation, and what did not burn had been cut down for fuel by starved and freezing urbanites. Both the Sheep Meadow and the Ramble had been plowed and planted in the years that followed—a quixotic enterprise, for the soil was not suited to agriculture. Then, after the fall of Washington , the entire Park from north to south had been donated to the Executive Branch under President Otis. It was Otis who had caused to be built the huge enclosing walls of brick, marble, and stone recovered from the ruins of Manhattan ; it was Otis who had designed the Hunting Grounds and stocked them with game; it was Otis who had erected the Executive Palace overlooking the Great Lawn.

Our path wound northward past ailanthus groves and broad meadows of mown grass to something called the Statuary Lawn, where large examples of sculpture dating from the Efflorescence of Oil had been preserved. Here to the left of us was a statue of a man on horseback, named Bolivar, and a stone spike called the Needle of Cleopatra. To the right, a huge metallic Arm held a verdigrised Torch as tall as an Athabaska pine, and a fractured Crowned Head adjoined it. [The Head and Arm were fragments of the Colossus of Liberty, Julian said. According to legend the Colossus used to stand astride the Verrazano Narrows , while boats and barges passed between her feet. A cursory inspection shows that the scale is off, and Liberty would not have been able to span the distance even with her legs splayed at an unflattering angle. Still, she must once have been a very large and prominently visible Statue—I don’t mean to diminish her grandeur.]

These items (and others like them) looked both bold and melancholy, casting shadows like the gnomons of monstrous sun-dials as we rode among them in the last light of the day.

We were not the only coach on the path. There was a regular circus of carriages, coaches, and mounted horsemen making their way toward the Executive Palace from each of the Park’s four Gates. The coaches had gilded fittings, the horsemen were formally dressed, and the carriage lanterns were lit and had begun to glimmer in the gathering dusk. All the finest and richest men and women of Manhattan had received an invitation to this annual fete. Those who did not, considered themselves slighted. The failure to receive an invitation was often a sign that some unlucky high Eupatridian had fallen from favor with the Executive; and the uninvited person, if he was a Senator, might begin to watch his back for knives.

Calyxa, of course, was not impressed with all this gaudiness and show, on account of her Parmentierist principles. I had hoped she would conceal her disdain for the Eupatridians, at least for the duration of the Independence Day event. But that was not to be the case.

We arrived near the vast stables of the Executive Palace , where boys in livery were accepting the carriages of the many guests. We dismounted and had begun to walk toward the entranceway of the Palace when we came across an angry Aristo beating his driver with a cane.

The Aristo in question was a stout man of middle age. His carriage had thrown a wheel, and the owner apparently blamed his driver for the accident. The driver was a man at least as old as his master, with hollow cheeks and a sort of doggish resignation about his eyes. He bore the beating stoically, while the Aristo cursed him in words I can’t repeat.

“What the hell!” exclaimed Calyxa, coming upon this scene.

“Hush,” Sam whispered to her. “That man is Nelson Wieland. He owns half the re-rolling mills in New Jersey , and holds a Senate seat.”

“I don’t care if he’s Croesus on a bicycle,” Calyxa declared. “He ought not to use his cane that way.”

“It’s none of our business,” Mrs. Comstock put in.

But Calyxa would not be dissuaded from walking right up to Mr. Wieland and interrupting him in the strenuous work of beating his employee.

“What has this man done?” she asked.

Wieland looked at her, blinking. He didn’t recognize Calyxa, of course, and he seemed to be confused about her status. By evidence of dress, if not deportment, she was a wealthy Aristo herself—she had, after all, been invited to a Presidential reception—and he decided at last to humor her.

“I’m sorry to trouble you with an unpleasant sight,” he said. “This man’s carelessness cost me a wheel—and not just the wheel but the axle, hence the carriage.”

“How was he careless?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly—he claims the rig struck a stone—that the suspension of the vehicle was not well-maintained—in other words he offers every excuse that would relieve him of responsibility. Of course I know better. The man shirks—it’s habitual with him.”

“And so you beat him bloody?”

This was not an exaggeration, for the blows had caused wounds which stained the fabric of the driver’s starched white shirt.

“It’s the only way he’ll mark the event in his memory. He’s an indentured man, and slow.”

“De toute évidence, non seulement vous êtes un tyran, mais en plus, vous êtes bête,” said Calyxa.

Mr. Wieland was brought up short by the unfamiliar language. He gave Calyxa another perplexed look, as if she were some exotic form of life, a crawfish perhaps, that had emerged unexpectedly from its native element. Perhaps he thought she was the wife of an ambassador.

“Thank you,” he said finally, “you flatter me, I’m sure; but I don’t speak the language, and I’m afraid of being late for the reception.” He took up his cane and hurried away.

Calyxa lingered a while longer with the beaten driver, conversing with him in a tone too low for me to overhear. They spoke until Sam called her back to us.

“Was that necessary?” he asked.

“That man you call Wieland is a thug, however much he owns.”

Julian asked what the injured driver had had to say for himself.

“He’s been working for Wieland most of his life. He’s a blacksmith’s son from some little town in Pennsylvania. His father sold him into Wieland’s mill when the smithy business failed. He spent years casting hubs, until the coal fumes made him stupid. That was when Wieland took him for a personal driver.”

“Then Wieland’s entitled to beat him if he chooses. The man is chattel.”

“Entitled by the law, maybe,” Calyxa said.

“The law is the law,” said Sam.

The Executive Palace was so expansive and grand that it might have done double-duty as a museum or a train station. We entered through a Portico, where marble pillars supported a cathedral-like ceiling, and passed into an immense Receiving Room, where Aristos clustered in conversation and waiters circulated with carts of drink and plates of small food items. Some of these [The food items, not the waiters.]were impaled on toothpicks. I thought it was a skimpy selection for a Presidential Dinner, until Julian explained that the morsels were not the main course but only “appetizers,” designed to provoke hunger rather than slake it. We picked at these trifles and tried to appreciate the elaborate wainscoting, which was painted with images from the history of the Pious Presidents, and the sheer scale of the architecture.

Julian’s fame had preceded him. In fact the story of his career as a soldier and his sudden re-appearance in Manhattan had circulated widely. Several Senators approached to congratulate him for his bravery, once his presence was noted, and many young Aristo women made a point of flattering him with their attention, though he was merely courteous in return.

Calyxa regarded these fashionable young women skeptically. I suppose they seemed unserious to her. They wore sleeveless gowns, in order to display the number and prominence of the vaccination scars on their upper arms. Mrs. Comstock said that such scars were a vain self-decoration: expensive, largely useless against disease, and a danger to the recipient. This might have been true, for several of the vaccinated women were pale, or seemed feverish or unsteady in their gait. But I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.

Julian did not stint his introductions as he passed through the crowd. He called me an “author” or a “scribe,” and Calyxa was “Mrs. Hazzard, a vocal artist.” Those of the elite to whom we spoke were unfailingly if briefly polite toward us. We were circulating a little uneasily among this mob of cheerful Eupatridians when the President of the United States made his first appearance.

He did not enter the Receiving Room, but greeted us from a sort of balcony at the top of a staircase. Stern and well-armed Republican Guardsmen were arrayed at his back, their demeanor suggesting that they might have preferred to aim their pistols at the crowd if etiquette had not precluded that hostile act. Silence fell over the room, until every face was turned toward Deklan Conqueror.

The coins didn’t do him justice, I thought. Or perhaps it was the other way around. He was less handsome than his graven image, but somehow more imposing. It was true that he looked a little like Julian, minus the feathery yellow beard. In fact he looked the way I imagined Julian might look if he were years older and not entirely sane.

I don’t say this to demean the President. Probably he couldn’t help the way he looked. His features were not irregular; but there was something about his narrow eyes, his hawk nose, and his fixed, ingratiating grin that suggested madness. Not out-and-out lunacy, mind you, but the kind of subtle madness that dallies alongside sanity, and bides its time.

I saw Julian wince at the sight of his uncle. Mrs. Comstock drew a choked breath beside me.

The President wore a suit of formal black that suggested a uniform without actually being one. The medals pinned to his breast accentuated the effect. He saluted the crowd, smiling all the while. He expressed his greetings to his guests, and thanked them all for coming, and regretted that he couldn’t visit with them more personally, but encouraged them to enjoy themselves with refreshments. Dinner would be served before long, he said, followed by Independence Day festivities in the Main Hall, and further refreshments, and fireworks on the Great Lawn, and then he would deliver a speech. It was a proud day for the Nation, he said, and he hoped we would celebrate it vigorously and sincerely. Then he disappeared behind a purple curtain.

He wasn’t seen again until after dinner.

When we filed into the dining hall we discovered that our seats at the long tables had been assigned to us, and marked with small ornaments bearing our names. Calyxa and I sat together, but nowhere near the other members of our party. Directly across from us—an unfortunate coincidence—was Nelson Wieland, the brutal industrialist who had made such a poor impression on Calyxa outside the stables. Seated beside him was a similarly aged gentleman in silk and wool, introduced to us as Mr. Billy Palumbo. It emerged in conversation over the soup course that Mr. Palumbo was an agriculturalist. He owned several vast domains in upper New York State , where his indentured people grew pea-beans and corn for the city market.

Mr. Wieland criticized the gourd soup, which he claimed was too thick.

“Seems all right to me,” Mr. Palumbo rejoined. “I like a substantial broth. Do you care for it at all, Mrs. Hazzard?”

“I suppose it’s fine,” Calyxa said in an indifferent tone.

“More than fine,” I added. “I didn’t know a common gourd could be made so palatable, or even harvested this time of year.”

“I’ve tasted better,” said Wieland.

The discussion continued in this culinary vein throughout the meal. Boiled onions were served—undercooked, or over; we debated them. Medallions of lamb—Palumbo considered the cut too rare. Potatoes: picked young. Coffee, too strong for Mr. Wieland’s constitution. And so on.

By the time dessert was served—wintergreen ice-cream, a novelty to me—Calyxa seemed prepared to throw her portion across the table, if Palumbo and Wieland didn’t leave off the topic of food. Instead she lobbed a different kind of missile. “Do your indentured people eat this well, Mr. Palumbo?” she asked abruptly.

The question took Palumbo by surprise. “Well, hardly,” he said. He smiled. “Imagine serving them ice-cream! They’d soon grow too stout to work.” [As Palumbo had, long since, though I do not hold a man’s girth against him.]

“Or perhaps they might work harder, if they had such a thing to look forward to at the end of the day.”

“I doubt it very much. Are you a radical, Mrs. Hazzard?”

“I don’t call myself that.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Compassion is a fine thing, but dangerous when it’s misplaced. What I’ve learned in many years of overseeing the indentured is that they have to be treated very strictly at all times. They mistake kindness for weakness. And if they see a weakness in an Owner they’ll take advantage of it. They’re notorious for their laziness, and inventive in finding ways to pursue it.”

“I agree,” Mr. Wieland put in. “For instance, that servant you saw me discipline earlier tonight. ‘Only a broken wheel,’ you might think. But let it slide, and tomorrow there would be two broken wheels, or a dozen.”

“Yes, that’s the logic of it,” Palumbo said.

“Logic,” Calyxa said, “if you carry it to its conclusion, might imply that men working against their will are not the most efficient laborers.”

“Mrs. Hazzard! Good grief!” exclaimed Palumbo. “If the indentured are sullen, it’s only because they fail to appreciate their own good fortune. Have you seen the popular film Eula’s Choice ?”

“Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“It explains the origins of the indenture system very succinctly. A bargain was struck sometime around the end of the False Tribulation, and the same terms obtain today.”

“You believe in the theory of Heritable Debt, Mr. Palumbo?”

“‘Heritable Debt’ is the radical’s term for it. You ought to be more careful in your reading, Mrs. Hazzard.”

“It’s a question of property,” Wieland interjected.

“Yes,” Calyxa said, “for the indentured don’t have any—in fact they are property.”

“Not at all. You defame the people you mean to defend. Of course the indentured have property. They own their bodies, their skills, if any, and their capacity for labor. If they don’t seem to own these things, it’s only because the commodity has already been sold. It happened as in the film Mr. Palumbo mentions. Refugees from the Fall of the Cities traded the only goods they possessed—their hands, their hearts, and their votes—for food and shelter in a difficult time.”

“A person ought not to be able to sell himself,” Calyxa said, “much less his vote.”

“If a person owns himself then he must be able to sell himself. Else what meaning does property have? As for the vote, he isn’t deprived of it—it still exists—he has only signed it over to his landed employer, who votes it for him.”

“Yes, so the Owners can control that sorry excuse for a Senate—”

This was perhaps too much to say. Nearby heads turned toward us, and Calyxa blushed and lowered her voice. “I mean, these are opinions that I have read. In any case, the bargain you describe was made more than a century ago, if it was made at all. Nowadays people are born into indenture.”

“A debt is a debt, Mrs. Hazzard. The commitment doesn’t vanish simply because a man has had the bad luck to die. If a man’s possessions pass by right to his survivors, so do his obligations. What have you been reading that left you laboring under such misapprehensions?”

“A man named… oh I think Parmentier,” Calyxa said, pretending innocence.

“Parmentier! That European terrorist! Good God, Mrs. Hazzard, you do need some direction in your studies!” Wieland cast an accusing glance at me.

“I have recommended the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton,” I said.

“The spread of literacy is the problem here,” said Palumbo. “Oh, I’m all in favor of a sensible degree of literacy—as you must be, Mr. Hazzard, given your career as a journalist. But it has an infectious tendency. It spreads, and discontent spreads along with it. Admit one literate man to a coffle and he’ll teach the others the skill; and what they read won’t be Dominion-approved works, but pornography, or the lowest kind of cheap publications, or fomentive political tracts. Parmentier! Why, Mrs. Hazzard, just a week ago I purchased a string of three hundred men from a planter in Utica , at what appeared to be a bargain price. I kept them apart from my other stock for a time, a sort of quarantine period, and I’m glad I did, for it turned out reading was endemic among them, and Parmentierist pamphlets were circulating freely. That kind of thing can ruin an entire Estate, if it flourishes unchecked.”

Calyxa didn’t ask what Mr. Palumbo had done to check the flourishing of literacy among his “stock,” perhaps because she feared the answer. But her face betrayed her feelings. She tensed, and I worried that she was about to fling some new accusation across the table, or perhaps a fork. It was at this moment, fortunately, that the dessert plates were cleared away.

Intoxicating drinks circulated freely after the meal, including such expensive abominations as Champagne and Red Wine. I did not partake, though the Eupatridians went at it like horses at a trough.

Deklan Comstock briefly appeared from another indoor balcony—he preferred a commanding height, Julian said—and invited us to step into the ballroom adjoining, where the band would play patriotic tunes. We followed at the President’s bidding. The music struck up at once, and some of the Aristos, well lubricated with fiery fluids, began to dance. I didn’t dance, and Calyxa didn’t want to; so we looked for genial company instead, well distant from Mr. Wieland and Mr. Palumbo.

We found company—or it found us—but it was not congenial, in the long run.

“Mr. Hazzard,” said a booming voice.

I turned, and saw a man in clerical garb.

I gathered he was some high functionary of the Dominion, for he wore a broad-rimmed felt hat with silver trimming, a sober black jacket, and a formal cotton shirt on which the legend John 3:16 was stitched in golden thread. I didn’t recognize his face, which was florid and round. He carried a glass in his hand, and the glass was half-filled with an amber fluid, and his breath smelled like the copper-coil stills Ben Kreel used to discover and destroy in the indentured men’s quarters back in Williams Ford. His eyes glittered with intrigue or drink.

“You know me, but I don’t know you,” I said.

“On the contrary, I don’t know you at all, but I’ve read your pamphlet on the subject of Julian Comstock, and someone was kind enough to point you out to me.” He extended the hand which was not holding a drink. “My name is Simon Hollings-head, and I’m a Deacon of the Diocese of Colorado Springs.”

He said that as if it was a trivial thing. It wasn’t. The simple title belied a powerful position in the Dominion hierarchy. In fact the only clergymen more elevated than the Deacons of Colorado Springs were the seventy members of the Dominion High Council itself.

Pastor Hollingshead’s hand was hot and moist, and I let go of it as soon as I could do so without offending him.

“What brings you to the east?” Calyxa asked warily.

“Ecclesiastical duties, Mrs. Hazzard—nothing you would understand.”

“On the contrary, it sounds fascinating.”

“Well, I can’t speak as freely as I would like. But the eastern cities have to be taken in hand from time to time. They tend to drift away from orthodoxy, left to their own devices. Unaffiliated Churches spring up like fungal growths. The mixing of classes and nationalities has a well-known degenerative influence.”

“Perhaps the Easterners drink too freely,” I couldn’t help saying.

“‘Wine that gladdens the heart of man,’” quoted the Deacon, though it appeared to be something more powerful than wine in his glass. [The quotation from Psalms is authentic, although it would never have been allowed into The Dominion Reader for Young Persons.]

“It’s sacred doctrine I’ve come to protect, not personal sobriety. Drinking isn’t a sin, though drunkenness is. Do I seem drunk to you, Mr. Hazzard?”

“No, sir, not noticeably. What sacred doctrines are in danger?”

“The ones that prohibit laxness in administering a flock. Eastern clergy will overlook the damnedest things, pardon me. Lubriciousness, licentiousness, lust—”

“The alliterative sins,” Calyxa said quietly.

“But enough of my problems. I meant only to congratulate you on your history of Julian Comstock’s military adventures.”

I thanked him kindly, and pretended to be modest.

“Young people have very little in the way of uplifting literature available to them. Your work is exemplary, Mr. Hazzard. I see it hasn’t yet received the Dominion Stamp. But that can be changed.”

It was a generous offer, which might result in an increase of sales, and for that reason I thought we shouldn’t offend Deacon Hollingshead unnecessarily. Calyxa, however, was in a sharp mood, and unimpressed with Hollingshead’s ecclesiastical rank and powers.

“Colorado Springs is a big town,” she said. “Doesn’t it have problems of its own you could be looking after?”

“Surely it does! Corruption can creep in anywhere. Colorado Springs is the very heart and soul of the Dominion, but you’re right, Mrs. Hazzard, vice breeds there as well as anywhere else. Even in my own family—”

He hesitated then, as if unsure whether he ought to proceed. Perhaps the liquor had made him distrust his tongue. To my dismay, Calyxa wouldn’t let the matter drop. “Vice, in a Deacon’s family?”

“My own daughter has been a victim of it.” He lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t ordinarily discuss this. But you seem to be a thoughtful young woman. You don’t bare your arms like so many of the ladies present, nor cover your skin with ugly vaccination marks.”

“My modesty is well-known,” Calyxa said, though she had lobbied to wear just such a sleeveless costume—Mrs. Comstock had overruled her.

“Then I won’t offend you by mentioning, um—”

“Unpleasant vices are offensive to me, Deacon Hollingshead, but the words describing them are not. How can we eradicate a problem unless we’re allowed to name it?”

She was baiting him; but Hollingshead was too virtuous or drunk to understand.

“Homosexuality,” he whispered. “Do you know that word, Mrs. Hazzard?”

“The rumor of such behavior has occasionally reached my ears. Is your daughter a—?”

“God forbid! No, Marcy is a model child. She’s twenty-one now. But because she has yet to marry, she drew the attention of a league of degenerate women.”

“In Colorado Springs !”

“Yes! Such a thing exists! And it continues to exist, despite all my efforts to eradicate it.”

“What efforts have you made?”

“Both the Municipal Police and the investigatory arm of the Dominion have been put on the case. Needless to say, I don’t let Marcy go anywhere unobserved. There are eyes on her at all times, though she doesn’t know it.”

“Is it really a wise thing to spy on your own daughter?”

“Certainly, if it protects her.”

“Does it protect her?”

“Several times it has saved her from absolute ruin. Marcy seems hardly able to leave the house without wandering by accident into some depraved tavern or other. Naturally, when we discover such establishments we shut them down. More than one degenerate woman has attempted to make Marcy a special friend. Those women were arrested and interrogated.”

“Interrogated!—why?”

“Because there’s more than coincidence at work,” the bibulous Deacon said. “Clearly, some group of deviants has targeted my daughter. We interrogated these women in order to find out the connection between them.”

“Has the effort succeeded?”

“Unfortunately no. Even under extreme duress, none of these women will admit that their interest in Marcy was planned in advance, and they deny all knowledge of any conspiracy.”

“Interrogations aren’t generally so fruitless, I take it,” said Calyxa, and I could tell by the reddening of her face that she didn’t approve of the Deacon’s enthusiastic approach to the knotty issues of vice and torture.

“No, they’re not. Our investigators are skilled at extracting information from the unwilling—the Dominion trains them in it.”

“How do you explain the failure in this case, then?”

“Vice has unsuspected depths and profundities—it hides by instinct from the light,” the Deacon said grimly.

“And it occurs so close to home,” Calyxa said, adding, in a low tone, “On aurait peut-étre dû torturer votre fille, aussi.”

I expected Deacon Hollingshead to ignore this incomprehensible remark. He did not. Instead he drew himself up in a rigid posture. His features hardened abruptly.

“Je ne suis ni idiot ni inculte, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said.

“Si vous vous moquez de moi, je me verrai dans l’obligation de lancer un mandat d’arrét contre vous.”

I didn’t know what this exchange meant, but Calyxa paled and took a step backward.

Hollingshead faced me. His put his smile back on, though it seemed forced. “I congratulate you again on your success, Mr. Hazzard. Your work does you credit. You have a fine career ahead of you. I hope nothing interferes with it.” He took a noisy sip from his glass and walked away.

I don’t mean to leave the reader with the impression that all the Eupatridians we met at the Presidential Reception were boors or tyrants. Many, perhaps most, were entirely pleasant, taken as individuals. Several of the men were yachtsmen, and I enjoyed listening to their spirited discourse on nautical subjects, though I couldn’t reef a mainsail if my life depended on it.

Mrs. Comstock knew a number of the wives. Many of them were astonished to see her here, so long after the death of her husband; but they were accustomed to the caprices of Presidential favor and quickly accepted her back into their ranks.

Sam spent his time with the military contingent, including a handful of notable Generals and Major Generals. I suppose Sam was gauging their attitude toward the Commander in Chief, or trying to pick up clues about the President’s intentions toward Julian. But all that was beyond my ken. Julian himself was deep in conversation with what he described to me as a genuine Philosopher: a Professor of Cosmology from the newly-reformed New York University. This man had many interesting theories, Julian said, about the Speed of Light, and the Origin of Stars, and other such refined subjects. But he was under the thumb of the Dominion, and could not discourse as freely as he might have liked. Nevertheless the man had enjoyed some access to the Dominion Archives, and hinted at the artistic and scientific treasures concealed there.

The general hilarity occasioned by the drinking of Grape Wine, etc., soon reached fresh heights. The musical band had adjourned for a short while—they were out behind the stables, Calyxa suggested, smoking hempen cigarettes—but they returned in relatively good order, and better spirits, just as Deklan Comstock made a third appearance on one of his marbled balconies.

This time the President called out recognition to the most elevated members of the crowd, including the Speaker of the Senate, Deacon Hollingshead, several prominent Landowners, the Surgeon General, the Chinese and Nipponese Ambassadors (who had been eyeing each other uneasily from opposite ends of the room), and other dignitaries. Then he smiled his unwholesome smile and said, “Also present, and home from his adventures defending the Union in Labrador , is my beloved nephew, Julian Comstock, as well as his celebrated Scribe, Mr. Adam Hazzard, and his former tutor, Sam Godwin.”

Hearing my name pronounced by this man was unnerving, and caused a shiver to rush up my spine.

“Mr. Hazzard,” the President continued, “has a very great and subtle literary talent, and I’ve recently learned that his wife is talented as well. Mrs. Hazzard is a singer, and it occurs to me to wonder whether she might favor us with a ballad or such, now that the band is warmed up. Mrs. Hazzard!” He feigned shielding his eyes against the light. “Mrs. Hazzard, are you willing to entertain these ladies and gentlemen?”

Calyxa’s jaw was grimly set—clearly this was Deklan Comstock’s attempt to humiliate her, and indirectly Julian, by exposing her as a cabaret singer—but at the same time it was an invitation she dared not refuse. “Hold my drink, Adam,” she said flatly; [Calyxa had not refused the Champagne as consistently as I had.]then she climbed up onto the bandstand where the musicians were arrayed.

This turn of events had taken the bandleader by surprise as well. He looked at her blankly, perhaps expecting her to call out a familiar song-title—Where the Sauquoit Meets the Mohawk, or some respectable piece like that.

But Calyxa was never one to do the expected, especially at the beck of a tyrant like Deklan Comstock. She looked out at the sea of Eupatridian faces confronting her. It was an awkward moment. She didn’t speak, or even smile, but lifted her cumbersome skirt and began to stomp her right foot. This activity amused some of the Aristos, and it didn’t display her ankles to her best advantage; but it established a terse martial beat, which the drummer soon picked up.

Then, without prelude, she began to sing:

There was shock at first. Many of the Eupatridians in the room knew this song, or had heard rebellious servants singing it from kitchens and cellars. If they didn’t know it intimately, they knew it by reputation. In any case the lyrics were explicit in their sympathy for the common man.

The silence and gasps from her audience did not discourage Calyxa, though even the drummer faltered for a beat or two. She finished the chorus and ran right through the first verse, which—like every other verse in this long and encyclopedic song—decried the suffering of some class of laborer at the hands of an Industrialist or Owner.

Heads turned toward President Deklan Comstock as if to gauge his reaction. Was he enraged? Insulted? Would the Republican Guard bring out their pistols and end the show abruptly?

But Deklan Conqueror didn’t appear to be angry. He raised his hand, instead, in a kind of mock salute.

That small gesture broadcast a signal among the Eupatridians that for tonight, at least, the usual proprieties had been suspended. They drew the inference that Calyxa’s performance was not a Protest but a kind of Show, ironically intended.

Piston, Loom, and Anvil sung at the Executive Palace ! It had the deliciously inverted logic of a bacchanal. A few of the more astute Aristos began to clap in time.

That caused the orchestra to take courage and join in. The musicians were all familiar with the tune, and began to work little trills and arpeggios around Calyxa’s powerful voice. Calyxa herself carried on as if none of these nuances mattered: it was the song she meant to sing, and she was singing it.

“Bless her,” said Julian, who had come to stand beside me.

Some in the room still didn’t appreciate the incongruous performance. Mr. Wieland, Mr. Palumbo, and Deacon Hollingshead stood in a single dour knot, arms crossed. Because they worked directly with indentured men, Wieland and Palumbo knew the song for what it was: a dagger aimed at their livelihoods. Deacon Hollingshead had no such direct interest, though he was a stalwart supporter of the status quo, and perhaps had tortured men who dared such verses in his presence. Even the President’s indulgence could not persuade these worthies to relax their vigilance.

In fact I began to worry about their health. Wieland’s already ruddy complexion deepened, until his head came to resemble a beet embedded in a shirt collar, and Palumbo wasn’t far behind in this competition.

Julian had once told me a story about deep-sea divers. In recent times it had become possible for Tipmen in sealed rubber suits, supported by air pumped to them from the surface, to descend into the murky waters around the ruins of seaside cities. This was an occasionally lucrative but wildly dangerous pursuit. It often yielded fresh treasure from sites that had, on land, been picked clean. But for every valuable antiquity thus obtained, a man’s life was put at risk.

It is a peculiar quality of the oceans that the pressure of the water increases with depth. There was a legend among these undersea Tipmen, Julian had said, that a diver, if he came untethered in deep enough water, might sink so far that the fist of the sea would squeeze him to death. Worse, the water pressure would literally roll him up like a tube of tooth-paste.

His body, encased in rubber, would be crushed and then forced into his enclosing helmet, so that the whole of him would at last be concentrated in that steel shell like a bloody stew in an inverted bowl—until even the helmet itself exploded!

This was, of course, usually fatal.

I thought about that legend (which, for all I know, may be true) as I looked at Wieland, Palumbo, and Hollingshead. With every succeeding verse—the one about the buried coal-miner, the one about the seamstress reduced to penury and prostitution by her employer, the one about the railway porter bisected by a runaway train—yet more blood rushed to the crania of these indignant gentlemen, until I wondered whether they would simply drop dead or whether their skulls would burst like pressed grapes.

Calyxa, if anything, was slightly miffed by the genial reception she was now receiving. She cranked out even more radical verses, which named Owners as Tyrants and Senators as Fools. “I’m not sure this is especially decorous,” said Mrs. Comstock from beside me. But the President continued to grin (though his grin was far from mirthful), and the Eupatridians, by and large, continued to mistake insult for irony, and smirked at the joke of it.

I began to think Calyxa’s inventive powers had been exhausted—which might have been a good thing—when she stepped to the very edge of the bandstand. Aiming her gaze directly and unmistakably at the industrialist Nelson Wieland, and still pounding the stage with her foot, she sang:

If there was any doubt whether she had improvised this verse for the specific benefit of Mr. Wieland, he didn’t share it. His eyes started from their sockets. He clenched his fists—in fact his entire body seemed to clench. It was as if the deep ocean had taken him in its grip.

Then, apparently satisfied with the reaction she had produced, Calyxa finished the chorus and addressed the agriculturalist Billy Palumbo, singing:

Mr. Palumbo was not accustomed to this kind of insolence any more than Mr. Wieland was. I watched with profound apprehension as the veins in and around his face stood forth. The legend of the explosive Diving Tipmen came once more to my mind.

Then, inevitably, it was Deacon Hollingshead’s turn. As she repeated the chorus the Deacon glared viciously. But Calyxa had faced down Job and Utty Blake, and she was not to be intimidated by a mere Dominion cleric, no matter how powerful. Her voice was her cudgel, and she meant to use it. She sang—con brio, as the composers say—

There was a sudden flash of light, and a thunderous report—I looked apprehensively at Deacon Hollingshead—but the Deacon was intact—it was only that the fireworks had begun out on the Great Lawn. The band abruptly ceased playing, and we all adjourned outside with a certain sense of relief.

Calyxa sat next to me, breathless from her exertions, and I was very proud of her, though very worried, as the Independence Day fireworks crackled through the hot night air above the Executive Palace.

She had probably just scotched any possibility that my Commongold pamphlet would receive the Dominion Stamp of Approval. But that didn’t matter much—the pamphlet was doing well enough without it. In any case, if it had been Deklan Comstock’s intention to humiliate Calyxa, I believed he had gotten more than he bargained for.

For the duration of the fireworks display we sat on wooden bleachers. There was a special box reserved for the President and a few close allies, including, I was dismayed to see, Deacon Hollingshead. Calyxa and I sat with Julian and Sam and Mrs. Comstock among the lesser Eupatridians.

“There are portents to be read at any event like this,” Sam said in a low voice. “Who attends, who doesn’t—who speaks to whom—who smiles, who frowns—it can all be read, the way a fortune-teller reads a deck of cards.”

“What fortune do you divine?” I asked.

“The Admiral of the Navy isn’t here. That’s unusual. There are no representatives from the Army of the Californias—ominous indeed. The Dominion is favored. The Senate is ignored.”

“I don’t know that I can parse such signs.”

“We’ll learn more when the President speaks. That’s when the axe will fall, Adam—if it does fall.”

“Is the axe literal or metaphorical?” I inquired anxiously.

“Remains to be seen,” said Sam.

That was alarming; but the matter was out of my control, and I tried to enjoy the fireworks while they lasted. The Chinese Ambassador had arranged for the importation of some incendiaries from his own Republic, as a gift to the President. The Chinese are experts in armaments and gunpowder. In fact the presence of that Ambassador, and his obvious largesse, propelled a rumor that Deklan Comstock was attempting to buy advanced weapons from China as a sort of riposte to the Chinese Cannon of the Dutch. [The Chinese were officially neutral in the War in Labrador , thereby doubling their supply of potential customers.]

Certainly the celestial fire was an excellent advertisement for Chinese workmanship. I had never seen such a display. Oh, we had had fireworks in Williams Ford—fine ones, and they had impressed me in my youth. But this event was altogether more spectacular. The warm summer air was alive with the smell of cordite, and the sky crackled with Occult Starbursts, Blue Fire, Whirling Salamanders, Keg-Breakers, and other such exotic devices. It was almost as noisy as an artillery duel, and I had to restrain myself from flinching when the bangs and stinks provoked unhappy memories of the War. But I reminded myself that this was Independence Day in Manhattan , not winter in Chicoutimi ; and Calyxa put a soothing arm around me when she saw that I was shaking.

The spectacle concluded after a good half-hour with a Cross of Fire that hung over Lower Manhattan like the benediction of an incendiary Angel. The band played The Star-spangled Banner.

The assembled Eupatridians applauded vigorously; and then it was time for Deklan Comstock to make the final speech of the evening.

The Executive Palace was fully electrified, powered by dynamos designed and operated by the Union’s most cunning engineers. A fierce artificial light drenched the stage that was set up for the President. [This light attracted flying insects in brigade strength, and they swooped back and forth as if bathing in it. Before long a number of bats joined in, drawn by the plentiful prey. It was as if another Feast was being conducted in the air, now that our own dinner had concluded.]

He stepped up on the makeshift wooden platform and braced his hands on both sides of the podium. Then he began to speak.

He began with homilies and platitudes appropriate to the occasion. He spoke about the Nation and how it was formed in an act of rebellion against the godless British Empire. He quoted the great Patriotic Philosopher of the nineteenth century, Mr. John C. Calhoun. He described how the original Nation had been debased by oil and atheism, until the Reconstruction that followed on the heels of the False Tribulation. He spoke of the two great Generals who had served as Presidents in times of national crisis, Washington and Otis, and flung about their names as if they were personal friends of his.

That eventually got him onto the subject of war. Here his voice became more animated, and his gestures bespoke a personal urgency.

“Perpetual peace is a dream,” he said, “as much as we may yearn for it—but war! War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe, without which the world would be swamped in selfishness and materialism. War is the very vessel of honor, and who of us could endure a world without the divine folly of honor? That faith is especially true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, during a campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. [A fairly succinct description of the situation in Labrador as I remembered it.]

On the field of battle, where a man lives or dies by the caprice of a bullet or the verdict of a bayonet, life is at its best and healthiest.”

“That’s a novel definition of health,” said Julian, but Sam hushed him.

“To date,” Deklan Conqueror declared, “we have had some notable successes in Labrador and some regrettable failures. Failure is inevitable in any war, I need not add. Not every campaign will be brought to a successful conclusion. But the number of failures in recent months points to a dismaying possibility. I mean the possibility that treason rather than fortune is at work in the Army of the Laurentians.” The President’s countenance became abruptly grim and judicial, and his audience cringed. “For that reason I have today taken bold steps to consolidate and improve our armed forces. Several Major Generals—I will not name them—have been taken into custody as I speak.

They will undergo public trials, and be given every opportunity to acknowledge and recant their plotting with the Dutch.”

Sam groaned quietly, for the unnamed Major Generals probably included men he knew and respected.

“The places of these traitors,” Deklan Conqueror continued, “will be filled from the ranks of enlisted men who have distinguished themselves in battle. Because of this we can look forward to renewed success in our effort to establish control over this sacred continent as a whole and the strategically important waterway to the north of it.”

He paused to sip from a glass of water. Absent fireworks, the night seemed very dark.

“But not all the news is bad. Far from it! We have had our share of successes. I need only cite the example of the Saguenay Campaign and the rescue of the town of Chicoutimi from its Mitteleuropan occupiers. And let me repeat, acknowledging a certain familial pride, that a key role in that battle was played by my own nephew Julian.”

Here the President smiled once more, and paused in the way that invites applause, which the nervous Eupatridians hastened to give him.

“Come up here, Julian,” the President called out, “and stand beside me!”

This was the humiliation Deklan Comstock had been storing up all evening. Putting Calyxa on show as a singer was only the prelude to it. He would have the son of the man he had murdered stand beside him as an ornament, helpless to protest.

Julian at first didn’t move. It was as if the command had scarcely registered on his senses. It was Sam who urged him out of the bleachers. “Just do as he says,” Sam whispered in a mournful voice. “Swallow your pride, Julian, this once, and do as he says—go on, or he’ll have us all killed.”

Julian gave Sam a vacant look, but he stood up. His journey to the Presidential Podium was visibly reluctant. He mounted the steps to the stage as if he were mounting a scaffold to be hanged, which was perhaps not far from the truth.

“Dear Julian,” the President said, and embraced him just as if he were a true and loving uncle.

Julian didn’t return the embrace. He kept his hands stiffly at his sides. I could see that any physical contact with the fratricidal Chief Executive was nauseating to him.

“You’ve seen more of war than most of us, though you’re still a very young man. What was your impression of the Saguenay Campaign?”

Julian blinked at the question.

“It was a bloody business,” he mumbled.

But Deklan Comstock didn’t mean to give his nephew the freedom of the podium. “Bloody indeed,” the President said. “But we’re not a nation that flinches at blood, nor are we a people constrained by feminine delicacy. To us all is permitted—even cruelty, yes, even ruthlessness—for we’re the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from bondage. We must not be miserly with blood! Let there be blood, if blood alone can drown the old secular world. Let there be pain, and let there be death, if pain and death will save us from the twin tyrannies of Atheism and Europe.”

Some cheering erupted, though not from our part of the bleachers.

“Julian knows first-hand the price and preciousness of liberty. He has already risked his life anonymously as a soldier of the line. Sacrifice enough for any man, you might say, and in normal times I would agree. But these aren’t normal times. The enemy presses. Barbarous weapons are deployed against our soldiers. The Northeastern wilds swarm with foreign encampments, and the precincts of Newfoundland are once again in jeopardy. Therefore we are called upon to make sacrifices.” He paused at that ominous word. “We are all called upon to make sacrifices. I don’t exclude myself! I, as much as any citizen, have to forego my own happiness, if it contradicts the greater national purpose. And as pleased as I am to have my brother’s son back in the bosom of my family, a soldier with Julian’s skill can’t be spared at this critical hour. For that reason I have already relieved from duty Major General Griffin of the Northern Division of the Army of the Laurentians, and I intend to replace him with my own beloved nephew.”

The audience gasped at the boldness of the proclamation. It was a great benevolence on the part of the President, or so he wanted us to think. The Eupatridians burst into another round of applause. Encouraging shouts of “Julian! Julian Comstock!” went up into the gunpowder-scented night.

But Julian’s mother didn’t join in the bellowing. She seemed to grow weak, and put her head on Calyxa’s shoulder.

“First Bryce,” she whispered. “Now Julian.”

“This is the axe I spoke of,” said Sam.