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

“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.

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.”