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

The night, already cold, had turned colder. We had dropped just near the hitching posts, and the horses whinnied at our unexpected arrival and blew steam from their nostrils. A fine, gritty snow had begun to fall. There was not much wind, however, and Christmas banners hung limply in the brittle air.

Julian made straight for his horse and loosed its reins from the post. “What do we do now?” I asked.

“You, Adam, will do nothing but protect your own existence, while I—”

But he balked at pronouncing his plans, and a shadow of anxiety passed over his face.

“We can wait this crisis out,” I insisted, a little desperately. “The Reserves can’t stay in Williams Ford forever.”

“No. Unfortunately neither can I, for Deklan Conqueror knows where to find me.”

“Where will you go, though?”

He put a finger to his mouth. There was a noise from the front of the Dominion Hall. The doors had been thrown open and the congregants were beginning to emerge. “Ride after me,” Julian said. “Quick, now!”

I did as he asked. We didn’t follow the main street, but caught a path that turned behind the blacksmith’s barn and through the wooded border of the River Pine, north in the direction of the Estate. The night was dark, and the horses stepped slowly; but they knew the path almost by instinct, and some light from the town still filtered through the thinly falling snow that touched my face like a hundred small cold fingers.

“It was never possible that I could stay at Williams Ford,” Julian said. “You ought to have known that, Adam.”

Truly, I should have. It was Julian’s constant theme, after all: the impermanence of things. He preached it like a sermon. I had always put this down to the circumstances of his childhood—the death of his father, the separation from his mother, the kind but impersonal tutelage of Sam Godwin.

But I couldn’t help thinking once more of the History of Mankind in Space and of the photographs in it—not of the First Men on the Moon, who were Americans, but of the Last Visitors to that celestial sphere, who had been Chinamen, and whose “space suits” had been firecracker-red. Like the Americans, they had planted their flag in expectation of more visitations to come; but the End of Oil and the False Tribulation had put paid to those plans.

Then I thought of the even lonelier Plains of Mars, photographed by machines, or so the book alleged, but never touched by human feet. The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places. Somehow I had stumbled into one. The snow squall ended. The uninhabited moon peeked through the clouds, and the winter fields of Williams Ford glowed with an unearthly luminescence.

“If you have to leave,” I said, “let me come with you.”

“No,” said Julian. He had pulled his hat down around his ears to protect himself from the cold, and I couldn’t see much of his face, but his eyes shone when he glanced in my direction. “Thank you, Adam. I wish it were possible.

But it isn’t. You must stay here, and dodge the draft, if possible, and polish your literary skills, and one day write books, like Mr. Charles Curtis Easton.”

That was my ambition, which had grown over the last year, nourished by our mutual love of books and by Sam Godwin’s exercises in English Composition, for which I had discovered an unexpected talent. [ Not a talent that was born fully-formed, however. Only two years previously I had presented to Sam Godwin my first finished story, which I had called “A Western Boy: His Adventures in Enemy Europe.” Sam had praised its style and ambition, but called attention to a number of flaws: elephants, for instance, are not native to Brussels, and are generally too massive to be wrestled to the ground by American lads; a journey from London to Rome can’t be accomplished in a matter of hours, even on “a very fast horse”—and Sam might have continued in that vein, had I not found an excuse to leave the room. ]

At the moment it seemed a petty dream. “None of that matters,” I said.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Julian said. “You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”

“Isn’t that the Philosophical point of view?”

“Not if the Philosopher knows what he’s talking about.” Julian reined up his horse and turned to face me, something of the imperiousness of his famous family entering into his mien. “Listen, Adam, there’s something important you can do for me—at some personal risk. Are you willing?”

“Yes,” I said immediately.

“Then listen closely. Before long the Reservists will be watching the roads out of Williams Ford, if they aren’t already. I have to leave, and I have to leave tonight. I won’t be missed until morning, and then, at least at first, only by Sam. What I want you to do is this: go home—your parents will be worried about the conscription, and you can try to calm them down, but don’t allude to any of what happened tonight—and first thing in the morning make your way to the Estate and find Sam. Tell him what happened at the Dominion Hall, and tell him to ride out of town as soon as he can do so without being caught. Tell him he can find me at Lundsford. That’s the message.”

“Lundsford! There’s nothing at Lundsford.”

“Precisely—nothing important enough that the Reservists would think to look for us there. You remember what the Tipman said last fall, about the place he found those books? ‘A low place near the main excavations.’ Tell Sam he can look for me there.”

“I will,” I promised, blinking against the cold wind, which irritated my eyes.

“Thank you,” he said gravely. “For everything.” Then he forced a smile, and for a moment he was no longer the President’s nephew, but just Julian, the friend with whom I had hunted squirrels and gazed at the moon. “Merry Christmas, Adam,” he said. “And all the Christmases to come.”

Then he wheeled his horse about and rode away.

There is a Dominion cemetery in Williams Ford, and I passed it on the ride back home, but my sister Flaxie wasn’t buried there.

As congregants of the Church of Signs we weren’t entitled to plots in the Dominion yard. Flaxie had a place in the acreage behind our cottage, marked by a modest wooden cross; but the cemetery put the thought of Flaxie in my mind, and after I returned the horse to the barn I stopped by her grave, despite the shivery cold, and tipped my hat to her, the way I had always tipped my hat to her in life.

Flaxie had been a bright, impudent, mischievous small thing—as golden-haired as her nickname implied. Her given name was Dolores, but she was always Flaxie to me. The Pox had taken her very suddenly and, as these things go, mercifully. I didn’t remember her death—I had been down with the same Pox, though I had survived it. What I remembered was waking up from my fever into a house gone strangely quiet. No one had wanted to tell me about Flaxie, but I had seen my mother’s tormented eyes, and I knew the truth without having to be told. Death had played lottery with us, and Flaxie had drawn the short straw.

(It is, I think, for the likes of Flaxie that we keep up a belief in Heaven. I have met relatively few adults, outside the enthusiasts of the established Church, who believe very fervently in Heaven; and Heaven was scant consolation for my grieving mother. But Flaxie, who was five, had believed in it wholeheartedly—imagined it was something like a summer meadow, with wildflowers blooming, and a picnic eternally under way—and if that childish belief soothed her in her extremity then it served a purpose more noble than truth.) To night the cottage was almost as quiet as it had been on the morning after Flaxie’s death. I came through the door to find my mother dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, and my father frowning into the bowl of his pipe as if it had posed a question he couldn’t answer. “The draft,” he said, as if this explained everything, which in fact it did.