The Martian General's Daughter

by Theodore Judson

  "I expect, sir," I said, "that Mr. Golden has sent a similar letter to every provincial general, offering each of them aid and money. Selin himself probably has a letter from him."

  Father got up from his cot. The governor of Mars Station looked an old man on his skinny, blue-veined legs as he paced the floor wearing only his tunic and his underclothes. He stopped and peered out the window for a long time, though I doubted he could see anything outside in the darkened tunnels very clearly. He was not frightened. Father had been through too much to fear anything any longer. Not even the prospect of his own death frightened him anymore. He was upset because he still cared for his distant family in Garden City and for the Empire, although both his family and the Empire had taken much from him and had never given him much in return.

  "There is one true thing in this letter that windbag has sent us," he said. "Should Selin become emperor, if he marches on Garden City and kills this pretender Chrysalis, then the days of my life are numbered. Selin will suffer no other army commanders. He'll purge the generals and the provincial governors and install members of that dreadful family of his in most of the dead men's places. He won't kill just me. He'll take my wife, my sons, all my relatives. Selin will do the same to anyone unwilling to carry water for him. I may not know these politicians in Garden City, those senators who want to be rulers of the world and the whispering rich men, but I do know the generals, and Selin is the worst of the lot."

  "We don't know anything definitely, sir," I said. "You need not worry yourself over something Mr. Golden has written. You know what a liar he is. Lie down and let Mica massage your legs some more. We will know the full story in a few days. There will be merchants in the marketplace who will tell us. Big news like this always travels with the tradesmen now that broadcast communications are compromised."

  He did as I bade him, and Mica's soothing hands soon had Father asleep and snoring loudly. When the lights in the great dome over the military camp were being dimmed, he awoke and had a simple dinner of cold polenta cakes and dehydrated vegetables. Father had gone to sleep another time when we in the household heard the soldiers outside chanting his name. Mr. Golden's messengers had spread their other letters throughout the entire camp, and now everyone knew of the events in Garden City. Thousands of people-Pan-Polarian troops, merchants from the tunnel communities, camp followers from outside the walls of the military post, and some of the now drunken scrap traders-were marching around our little house, proclaiming in a dozen different languages that General Peter Black was the new lord of the Pan-Polarian Empire. Father was completely befuddled. He stood at the window and shouted at the disorderly crowd to be quiet. To every officer he saw tramping past he barked an order to the effect that the men should be gotten back inside their barracks. "Make them stop!" he told his commanders. "I'm not of royal blood! I'm not even one of the Anthony family! I'm a common soldier!" The officers were busy till long after dark getting the soldiers to return to their quarters. After that had been accomplished we could still hear the civilians shouting "Black, Black, Peter Black!" outside the limits of the camp.

  "All I wanted to do today was buy some uninfected scrap," said my father as he lay back down and put an arm over his forehead. "Now I have a camp full of idiots eager to have me declare myself emperor! We have to have a better plan tomorrow, Justa."

  ifteen years before the letter from Mr. Golden came to us on Mars, we had first met the last of the Anthonys at Progress, a dreary military outpost on the Amur built of gray stone the near constant snow and wind of that forested region had striped with lines of white patina. Father was by then already a decidedly middle-aged man, vigorous and selfconfident, yet as weathered from his years of military service as the stones of Progress's houses and fortifications were from the snow. My father may have never been a great strategist when at the head of an entire army, but while in the ranks, while serving at the head of a company or in command of a division, he had no equal. Tactics he left to Fate; Father knew the power of discipline and courage, and on those two pillars he had built his long career. He reasoned he had always been strong enough and brave enough to get the job done, and if he were brave and strong in the future, that would suffice to meet all challenges. His heroism in the East during the Fourth Mesopotamian War, when he led a detachment of foreign auxiliaries to glory in the siege of New Babylon, was a story known throughout the Empire, even unto the emperor. We were at that time ruled by Mathias Anthony, whom we remember as Mathias the Glistening, the philosopher-king presiding over that portion of the world between the Isthmus of Panama and the Gobi Desert. Mathias brought Father to the Amur while the gathering army there was preparing to strike across the river at the Manchurian rebels stirring on the southern shore. The emperor had placed under Father's command an entire division, the famous Twentieth, which Mathias had transferred from Britain for the sake of this one campaign. Father was so proud of his new assignment he ordered the Twentieth's wild boar insignia sewn into his personal clothing and onto the sleeves of his military tunics. In our household the image of the wild boar was stamped onto our dishes, stitched into our blankets, made the default image on our family's hologram projector, and was carved into the upright posts of our beds and furniture so that while Father was relaxing at home among his few humble pieces of property he would be continuously reminded of how high he had risen in the world.

  In those brave days Father had not yet faced anything he could not defeat with his strong right arm and ten thousand troopers armed with energy weapons. He certainly never needed any assistance when he strode from place to place and from triumph to triumph. Like all men, he was ambitious. Never was he overreaching. I doubt that at the time Father thought there was any higher place to which a man of his background could rise.

  Mathias's son, Luke Spacious Anthony, was with us on the Amur. His father had the year before named him coemperor, albeit the boy was a month from his seventeenth birthday and unready for the responsibilities of his office. Real administrative power remained in Mathias's hands. The whole world-and especially the soldiers amassing at Progress, who would witness young Luke Anthony's first public duty-was eager to know more about this boy destined to rule alone after his father's death. The general expectation was that the son would be a younger and more vigorous version of Mathias the Glistening, the wise and generous ruler who had kept the domestic peace and protected the Empire from foreign invasions as ably as any leader of Pan-Polaria ever had. "A lion does not sire a jackal," was my father's estimation of the boy before he met him. (My father was fond of animal metaphors throughout his life, and often shared them with those in his home, sometimes sharing them many times over.) What Father and the world would get in young Luke Anthony would be, as I will tell, something far worse than a jackal.

  I was a precocious twelve-year-old when we came to cold Progress in the seventeenth year of Mathias's reign. My life up to then had been a series of stays at Father's various postings in the Middle East and in the Asteroid Belt. During my entire existence I had dwelt in the rectangular encampments the Pan-Polaric Army builds everywhere it goes, and I had seen soldiers marching outside our front door ever since I was old enough to be aware of my existence. My father never knew how to explain that existence of mine to other men: to his superiors he said the dark-skinned girl always about his quarters was the child of one of his servants, but to his brother officers of his own rank he admitted I was his illegitimate daughter, one born to a mistress long since dead. Father in those times was not a religious man. (I mean he did not participate in any of the prescribed religions or in any of the mystery cults that had emerged throughout the Empire during the previous century.) Outwardly he was a gruff, downright stern figure in the polished body armor he could never wear too often or shine too diligently. Within his heart he felt more guilt than he dared confess on account of the child living in his home. Father assigned failings to other men, not to himself. He knew the other soldiers, even some of the other officers, had unofficial wives
living in the makeshift villages outside the military encampments. Father did not consider himself to be the same as other men. I was a memento of the instance he had slipped as badly as others did every day and as he had disciplined himself never to do.

  Father kept a Canadian amanuensis named Clemens to read and write the orders of the day for him before I would perform those duties; this same man had taught me the two great languages of the Empire, and I had devoured every book in the English and Syntalk tongues I could lay my hands upon, which were really only those Clemens could borrow from other learned men and women who happened to be in the vicinity. As is true of most people exposed to a little learning, I was inordinately proud of myself. I did not come near my father without repeating something from Homer or Herman Bing, and I must have been a terrible irritant to him whenever he came home to eat or sleep. My father's plan was to keep me until I came of age, then marry me to a man suitable to my lowly station-meaning my future husband would at best be a worker or a common soldier, and my learning did not make me a better match for any man I was likely to wed. Father often reminded me of that fact when I showed off my abilities in algebra or my knowledge of world history. While his sense of honor compelled him to provide for me, his sense of propriety obligated him not to tell his legitimate wife in Garden City or my two half brothers that I existed; this family he seldom visited had risen in the social strata of the capital as Father rose in military rank. The three of them could barely tolerate the tough old campaigner when Father managed to travel to that great city, and they most definitely could not have endured the presence of his Syrian bastard. I therefore grew up as an only child, one surrounded by the vivid, noisy atmosphere of the PanPolarian Army. I idolized and feared my tall, muscular father, who appeared more muscular than he in fact was when he wore his body armor, but I lived within my treasured books and in the dreamland they inspired in my thoughts.

  My father had met Emperor Mathias a year earlier, when the great man made a tour of the Middle Eastern provinces. Mathias the Glistening used a network of informers recruited from among the army's quartermaster corps and from the petty court officials, tax farmers, and provincial policemen to keep track of the important men within the Empire. Thus Mathias already knew everything about Father, including every thing about me, long before he encountered Father face-to-face. Mathias would have known that two men could not have been as different as he and his General Peter Black; still he granted my father the rare honor of a private interview during his stay in Alexandria. What the emperor, one of the great thinkers of the age, and my father, famous among his soldiers for his monosyllabic speeches, could have found to discuss baffles me yet today. It baffled me more that the emperor formed a favorable opinion of my father during their brief meeting. But then Mathias's judgment of others was a mysterious facet of the great man. He was consistently more compassionate than discerning when he evaluated others. It satisfied Mathias that my father, like himself, was a veteran of a hundred pitched fights and had never flinched from his duty. Mathias appreciated the horrors Father had endured for the Empire's sake as only another soldier would. At Alexandria, on the southern rim of the Empire, Mathias had promised Father the Twentieth Division and bade him come to Progress the following spring.

  Our new home in icy Siberia was a stone hovel within sight of the emperor's great hall, a massive building that stood at the very center of the military station and atop which were erected the encampment's primary communication towers. The four of us-Father, myself, Father's Greek servant Medus, and Medus's wife, Helen, who had been my nurse when I was an infant-were miserable in that cold, smoky, very crowded little house set in that wet, freezing land that may be a fit home for bears and savage men but offers only frozen ground and vast distances to civilized people. The elder Ming and the natural historian Rodriguez tell us Siberia is so very cold due to its gigantic size and to its low basins in which inversion takes place and traps the cold air close to the ground during the winter and keeps the sun from breaking through during the brief summer; these learned men say that if we laid an electronic grid underneath portions of that forbidding land and powered the grid with nuclear generators, we could make the heated portions as warm and as fertile as California. If there is a sliver of truth in what they write, my two years in Progress convinced me that the first duty of an emperor-should large-scale electronic projects ever again become possible-would be to do whatever can be done to heat that chilly corner of Pan-Polaria. While we were there we had to keep the primitive wood-burning fireplace burning day and night, as did the other souls trapped within the four straight walls of the encampment, and thus there was always a gray cloud around our houses to match the gray clouds high above us. When we did see the sun, it appeared to us a weak, silver circle that was as feeble as the light reflected in a blind man's eyes. Never did it give off enough heat; it merely illuminated the misty air during the daytime and let us behold what an ugly bog we had as a home.

  My old nurse Helen had long been a believing woman. She believed in the Lady of Flowers, in the Christian Jesus, in the Muslim Allah, in the Great Mother, in Minit the god of human sacrificers, and in anything anyone ever imagined could have a power over us, including those things that move in the night and do not have a proper name. Helen knew the secret practices that lie outside religion altogether. Whenever my father was gone from the house and could not object to her nonsense, she would sit before the fire and read the future in the ashes the flames left behind, a trick she claimed to have learned in California, the home of Pan-Polarian spiritualism.

  "The Pan-Polarian Army will defeat the Chinese," she told me one afternoon when she had scooped up a handful of black cinders and tossed them into the air.

  "Will this be the last time we attack them?" I asked her.

  She stirred the ashes with a stick while she considered my question. My love for Helen prevented me from telling her I did not have any faith in her divining skills or in any of the other superstitious notions she had.

  "Yes, this will be the last time," she said.

  Events would prove her prediction wrong a dozen times in the next forty years, but I never upbraided her with facts.

  "One more thing," she said. "This is an unlucky place."

  "I would think so," I said. "Look outside. Progress is too wet for people, too cold for the fish in the river. It is an unlucky place for everyone but the geese; they get to fly away anytime they want."

  She told me to hush.

  "Show some respect for the mysteries of the gods, child," she told me. "Look at how they have made the world colder," she added, which was a warning millions of elders had given children ever since-for apparently natural reasons-the Earth had become a couple degrees colder during the twenty-second century. "Look, Justa," she exclaimed, and spat into the ash pile. "The signs say you, child, are in grave danger here! You should never go outside the door without my permission, and never, never should you go spying around the emperor's residence!"

  Wherever we lived, the gods of the ash heap told Helen I should not go outside. Her gods were a very anxious lot when I was a little girl. Like Helen, they feared the thousands of armed men drilling in the open spaces outside our door, and they wanted me to stay indoors and under Helen's supervision where I might learn the arts of sewing and cooking every young woman needs to know now that we no longer have the domestic conveniences our ancestors did. The gods' warnings, I regret to say, never worked on me. I would sneak out of the house regardless of the dangers they foresaw and would go places I should not have, regardless of how much they and Helen fussed. In dreary Progress, the one place the gods and Helen warned I definitely should not go was the emperor's hall, which was, of course, the one place in the entire station I wanted to give a closer inspection. Hundreds of tall, clanking soldiers came and went through that building's chromium steel doors every day, as did emissaries from the Senate in Garden City and local officials from Vladivostok, the provincial capital. I stood at the doorway of our little
hut and imagined as I gazed at the gray exterior of the emperor's quarters that the interior of that fourstory building must be lined with crystal and metal machines and that inside its central hallway were elegant men in pristine white suits bearing the purple stripe of nobility, and those elegant men would be holding video conferences with other important men back in Garden City as they discussed the affairs of the world with the studied honesty of the philosophers in the books I read. I would be utterly disappointed when I in time found the inside of the hall was as drab as its outside shell and that the men therein were mostly soldiers who looked and acted exactly like the ones I could see on the exercise grounds.

  On the day Mathias announced the coming arrival via jet transport of his son in Progress he invited his generals to a banquet that would welcome the young coemperor to that frozen bit of Hades.

  "You will bring your daughter, sir," he told my father in a private conference.

  "I have two sons in Garden City, my lord," Father told him. "No daughters."

  "I am the Empire," Mathias told him. "I see all, hear all, or so they say I do. You have an unofficial daughter living here with you, Peter. I think it commendable of you to accept your responsibilities to her. She will want to see me; I am the great emperor and so on. I might be quite impressive, to a child of her age. I am curious to see what sort of little girl lives her whole life in military stations. Indulge me, my friend. I am interested in how children develop. But then, most of us are, aren't we? We think children will explain to us how we each became what we are. Bring her to the banquet."

  Helen took an entire morning to bathe me in Father's little portable tub and an afternoon to fix my hair into an extravagant pile of curls, which she said was exactly the same style as noble women in Garden City wore. (Perhaps the noble women did, just not in that particular century.) Helen patched together a white gown for me out of the bits of one of my father's old garments. Once she had checked the fit on me, she made me take off the dress, and I had only my shift to wear till it was time for us to walk to the great hall.