Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

“I could hardly say you are, sir.”

“And much of what Julian may have described to you is no doubt true. I’ve traveled some myself, you know, Adam. I’ve seen Colorado Springs , Pittsburgh—even New York City. Our Eastern cities are great, proud metropolises—some of the biggest and most productive in the world—and they’re worth defending, which is one reason we’re trying so hard to drive the Dutch out of Labrador.”

“Surely you’re right.”

“I’m glad you agree. Because there’s a trap certain young people are prey to. I’ve seen it before. A boy might think one of those great cities is a place he can run away to —a place where he can escape all the duties and obligations he learned at his mother’s knee. Simple things like faith and patriotism can feel to a young man like burdens, which might be shrugged off when they become too weighty.”

“I’m not like that, sir,” I said, though every word he spoke seemed to have my name written all over it.

“And there’s yet another element in the calculation. The conscription threatens to carry you out of Williams Ford; and the thought that runs through many boys’ minds is, if I must leave, then maybe I ought to leave on my own hook, and find my destiny on a city’s streets rather than in a battalion of the Athabaska Brigade… and you’re good to deny it, Adam, but you wouldn’t be human if such ideas didn’t occur to you.”

“No, sir,” I muttered, and I felt my guilt increasing, for I had in fact been a little seduced by Julian’s tales of city life, and Sam’s dubious lessons, and the History of Mankind in Space —perhaps it was true that I had neglected my obligations to the village that lay so still and so inviting in the blue near distance.

“I know,” Ben Kreel said, “things haven’t been easy for your family. Your father’s faith, in particular, has been a trial, and we haven’t always been good neighbors to you—speaking on behalf of the village as a whole. Perhaps you’ve been left out of activities other boys enjoy as a matter of course: picnics, games, friendships.... Well, even Williams Ford isn’t Paradise. But I promise you, Adam: if you find yourself in the Brigades, and especially if you find yourself tested in time of war, you’ll discover that the same boys who shunned you in the dusty streets of your home town become your best friends and bravest allies, and you theirs. For our common heritage knits us together in ways that may seem obscure, but become obvious under the harsh light of combat.”

I had spent so much time smarting under the remarks of other boys (that my father “raised vipers the way other folks raise chickens,” for example) that I could hardly credit Ben Kreel’s assertion. But I knew very little of modern warfare, except what I had read in the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, so it might be true. And the prospect (as was intended) made me feel even more shame-faced.

“There!” Ben Kreel said. “Do you hear that, Adam?”

I did. I could hardly avoid it. The bell was clanging in the Dominion church steeple, announcing the early Ecumenical Service. It was a silvery sound on the winter air, at once lonesome and consoling, and I wanted almost to run toward it—to shelter in it, as if I were a child again.

“They’ll be wanting me,” Ben Kreel said. “Will you excuse me if I ride ahead?”

“No, sir. Please don’t mind about me.”

“As long as we understand each other. Don’t look so downcast, Adam! The future may be brighter than you expect.”

“Thank you for saying so, sir.”

I stayed a while longer on the low bluff, watching as Ben Kreel’s horse carried him toward town. Even in the sunlight I felt the cold, and I shivered some, perhaps more because of the conflict in my mind than because of the weather. The Dominion man had made me ashamed of myself, and had put into perspective my loose ways of the last few years, and pointed up how many of my native beliefs I had abandoned before the seductive Philosophy of an agnostic Aristo and an aging Jew.

Then I sighed and urged Rapture back along the path toward Williams Ford, meaning to explain to my parents where I had been, and to reassure them that I wouldn’t suffer too much in the coming conscription, to which I would willingly submit.

I was so disheartened by the morning’s events that my eyes drifted toward the ground even as Rapture retraced his steps. As I have said, the snows of the night before lay largely undisturbed on this back trail between the town and the Estate. I could see where I had come through this morning, Rapture’s hoofprints having recorded the passage as clearly as figures in a book. Then I reached the place where Julian and I had parted the night before. There were more hoofprints here, in fact a crowd of them.

And I saw something else written (in effect) on the snowy ground—something which alarmed me.

I reined up at once.

I looked south, toward Williams Ford. I looked east, the way Julian had gone last night.

Then I took a bracing inhalation of icy air, and followed the trail that seemed to me most urgent.

The east-west road through Williams Ford was not heavily traveled, especially in winter.

The southern road, which was called the “Wire Road” because the telegraph line runs alongside it, connected Williams Ford to the railhead at Connaught, and sustained a great deal of traffic. But the east-west road went essentially nowhere: it was a remnant of a road of the Secular Ancients, traversed mainly by Tipmen and freelance antiquarians, and then only in the warmer months. I suppose, if you followed the old road as far as it would take you, you might reach the Great Lakes, or somewhere farther east, in that direction; or you could ride the opposite way, and get yourself lost among washouts and landslips in the Rocky Mountains. But the railroad—and a parallel turnpike farther south—had obviated the need for all that trouble.

Still, the east-west road was closely watched where it left the outskirts of Williams Ford. The Reserves had posted a man on a hill overlooking it, the same hill where Julian and Sam and I had paused for blackberries on our way from the Tip last October. But it was a fact that the Reserve troops were held in Reserve, and not sent to the front lines, mainly because of a disabling flaw of body or mind—some were wounded veterans, missing a hand or an arm; some were elderly; some were too simple or sullen to function in a disciplined body of men. I can’t say anything for certain about the soldier posted as lookout on the hill, but if he wasn’t a fool he was at least utterly unconcerned about concealment, for his silhouette (and the silhouette of his rifle) stood etched against the bright eastern sky for all to see. But maybe that was intentional, to let prospective fugitives know their way was barred.

Not every way was barred, however, not for someone who had grown up in Williams Ford and hunted everywhere on its perimeter. Instead of following Julian directly I rode north a distance, and then through an encampment of indentured laborers, whose ragged children gaped at me from the glassless windows of their shanties, and whose soft-coal fires made a smoky gauze of the motionless air. This route connected with lanes cut through the wheat fields for the transportation of harvests and field-hands—lanes that had been deepened by years of use, so that I rode behind a berm of earth and snake rail fences, hidden from the distant sentinel. When I was safely east I came down a cattle-trail that reconnected me with the east-leading road, on which I was able to read the same signs that had alerted me back at Williams Ford, thanks to a fine layer of snow still undisturbed by any wind.