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

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

“In any case,” Julian said, “the man’s motivation is plain enough. He was carrying a crudely-printed leaflet demanding the restoration of Deklan Conqueror to the Executive.”

“But if he can’t read or write—”

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

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

“And there’s the question of the Republican Guards,” Julian continued.

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

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

“Again,” Sam said in a conciliatory tone, “you don’t know—”

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

“How do you propose to act, then?”

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

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

“I’m sure it does. You ought to rest now.”

“Not just yet. I have business to take care of.”

“What business?”

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

“Presidential business,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That feeling was compounded one Friday evening when I went to join Julian and Magnus Stepney to plan out the next week’s efforts on Charles Darwin.

The new Captain of the Republican Guards, whom I had not met, was standing watch over the Library Wing when I turned a corner in one of that building’s long halls and nearly collided with him.

“Watch out,” the new man cried, “I’m not a door you can swing wide and walk through—state your business, mister—but— be damned if it isn’t Adam Hazzard!

Adam, you bookworm! I’ll shake your hand or know why not!”

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

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

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

“I did, and we have a daughter now—I’ll introduce you!”

“You wrote a book, too, somebody told me.”

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

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

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

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