The Martian General's Daughter

by Theodore Judson

  Father and his servant Medus both went with the Twentieth Division, leaving Helen and myself in the military station among the other women and children. Most of the other senior officers sent their families back to Garden City or to other places far from the lonely outpost, and in those distant spots the families awaited word of the expected victories. I was terribly alone that long summer and fall the soldiers were gone. I rarely had the company of other children during my youth: my peculiar situa tion was far too lowly for me to have friends among the offspring of other generals; being the daughter of a legion commander I was far too highborn to associate with the unofficial children dwelling outside the station walls. At Progress I daily wandered like a sparrow through the nearly deserted encampment, playing games with imaginary companions and dreaming of what Father and the emperor were doing beyond the southern horizon.

  Luke Anthony had ridden on a personnel carrier beside his father into the Manchurian countryside, and had left his pack of jaded playmates in a cluster of drab buildings near the central hall Mathias had used. Other children left in the station made a pastime of running near to the quarters of the young coemperor's entourage and shouting the nasty expletives they had learned by listening to their elders discuss Luke Anthony's friends. The scamps would run away if one of the insulted hanger-ons emerged from a doorway to see what was happening. I stayed away from Luke's people from Garden City because Helen had told me there were witches from the secret cults among the group. I knew my old nurse was trying to frighten me away from that loud, drunken crowd that partied late into the night after every sunset. I also knew there were certain women from East Africa in Luke Anthony's group who painted their eyebrows green and wore spangled clothing and certainly looked to my twelve-year-old eyes to be the hawk-faced practitioners of the forbidden arts Helen had told me about in her stories. "Witches eat nosy little girls, you know," Helen told me. I did not linger near the strange foreign women to learn if she was telling the truth. I preferred staying close to the river and the only living foliage in the region; at least there I could see types of life I could understand, and observing the sparse stands of trees and rusting trucks on the other shore somehow made me feel closer to Father.

  Luke Anthony returned to Progress unexpectedly in the middle of the summer. A small detachment of the Mexican horseman was his only escort through the wild countryside on his journey back to us. There had been a scrimmage in the Manchurian wasteland, and despite his reputation for ferocity and his love of staged combats, Luke Anthony had disgraced him self by running from the first enemy gunshots of the campaign. After the Pan-Polaric troopers had routed the suicidal Chinese assault, Mathias had disparaged his son as a coward in front of the entire high command. Report had it that some generals present had laughed at the humiliating quaking the young man did when he suffered the emperor's rage. I thank Providence my father was not so foolish as those laughing officers. Anyone who mocked Luke Anthony on that day died soon after he became sole ruler of the Empire.

  "I didn't flee," Luke had reportedly told his father. "My carrier's engine seized up, and I had to get out and run."

  "Then your carrier was a cowardly machine, young man," Mathias was said to have replied. "Take it back to Progress. I'll not have such a fainthearted machine among these other brave vehicles. When you have found a less nervous transport, one that will carry you toward danger rather than to the rear, you may return to us."

  Luke Anthony apparently had a difficult time finding a better ride in the nearly vacant military camp. He loitered for months on the safe side of the Amur, hunting day after day and reveling with his friends during the warm nights. His teams of beaters daily made wide sweeps through the forest surrounding the station, sometimes driving game right against the stone walls or into the river. These drivers and their dogs (they used real ones, rather than the mechanical hounds that had been popular a few years earlier) attempted to tighten their large arc into a slowly constricting circle that would meet at a point where Luke would kill the trapped animals with his methane and gunpowder-powered rifle. Pan-Polarian troopers have traditionally left the mastery of such conventional weapons to foreign auxiliaries while our men carried laser or particle beam rifles. Luke Anthony had mastered the use of such ancient weapons while hunting and training with Mexican peasants in the hills around Garden City. Everyone agreed he was an expert shot. Those in the station who had seen him mow down the trapped deer, bear, wild boar, wolves, and tigers say he rarely missed, though he rode a motorcycle while he fired, and that the more he killed the more he went into an ecstasy of delight. When he became lost in the frenzy of the slaughter, the beautiful young man with the long golden curls would put a titanium sabot through the heart of some doomed beast and scream, "I am Luke Spacious Anthony! I am the Empire!" After all the animals in a trapped group had fallen, he would hop off his motorbike and run into the piles of dead and find a beast that was still convulsing so he could ask the dying creature if it appreciated the great honor of dying at the hands of the emperor of the Northern Hemisphere. Those telling the story say he waited for a reply and would savage the animal with his sidearm when the beast presumed to die without giving him one.

  Once, on a rare cloudless day, I was walking along the river near the remains of a disassembled bridge when I heard the barking dogs and the "clang" of the beaters beating their flails against their body armor as they moved from the north toward me. To my horror, I realized the hunting party was not only headed for the Amur; it was converging directly upon a smattering of small houses built outside the encampment walls a few rods from where I was. The underbrush suddenly flickered to life as animals crashed through the foliage and toward the water. I at once ran onto the remaining portion of the bridge, the middle section of which had been removed, and I lay flat inside one of the concrete foundations, thus hiding myself from the oncoming hunters. I peered over the edge of the concrete shielding me and beheld the beaters' circle drawing tight immediately west of the end of the bridge. Several deer leapt into the river and swam away before the beaters could get between them and the water. A frightful uproar took place as various creatures and two small boys who had been caught in the sweep dashed into the open, crashing into each other and howling in terror as they found themselves inside the ring of the beaters' shields. A large bear, its front leg wounded by a rifle shot, charged into the ring and with two swipes of its good forepaw tore open a large dog and ripped the side of one of the terrified boys, both of whom were shrieking to the beaters to let them go. Luke Anthony, looking as dashing as Alexander riding down the Persian army, rode his motorcycle to the outside of the ring and fired once into the bear's chest, killing it instantly. He was as tremendous a marksman as everyone had claimed. From his mount he fired round after round into the animal melee before him. Every sabot he sent into the chaos went straight into a beast's vital organs; a boar, three stags, a fox, and a bull from a nearby farm were caught in midflight and fell lifeless on the ground. Luke Anthony then took a flail from a beater and chased the two small boys about the ring on his motorcycle, slapping them with the blunt weapon as he swore aloud.

  "You cost me three deer!" he shouted as he struck them from his mount. "Don't you know who I am?"

  The boys were covered in blood. Their screams had degenerated to less than human cries of distress and were more like the squeals of dying cattle inside a charnel house. The boy the bear had mauled soon could withstand no more and collapsed in the dirt beneath the wheels of Luke's cycle. The other one charged the beaters' wall, but the heartless men knocked him back with their flails. Unable to escape the scene, the pathetic child curled into a ball on the unprotected dirt where Luke Anthony continued to beat him.

  "I am the emperor!" the brave hunter shouted. "I am the Empire!"

  He might have pummeled the two hapless boys to death but for the actions of his friend Sao Trentex-of whom I have forever after thought better-for that second young man broke into the ring of beaters and declared to Luke Anthon
y that perhaps Emperor Mathias would learn of this incident if the two children were killed.

  "Are you afraid of him?!" shrieked Luke Anthony, wild with the strange satisfaction violence gave him and raising the flail in the air as though he were about to bring it down on his friend's pockmarked head.

  The boys were fortunate Sao Trentex thought quickly. The cunning fellow dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in an exaggerated gesture of supplication.

  "Oh, yes, Luke Anthony!" he said in a semihysterical voice that made young Luke smile. "I fear your father will come back to Progress and give us another lecture on moral philosophy! I know you do not fear death, my lord. I quiver for the both of us when I think we might have to endure another seminar burdened by his vast piety! Please bear in mind that the rest of us are mortal, my lord! We cannot endure as much of his sanctimonious person as you can!"

  Luke Anthony laughed, which cued the rest of his group they should laugh with him. Sao Trentex's joke had broken the bloodthirsty mood that had seemed to grip him only seconds before. Luke gave the flail back to its owner, and having ordered his men to dress the fallen game he rode toward the great hall. The moment he was gone, Sao Trentex had some of the bearers carry the two boys to a physician. He wrapped the most bloodied of the children in his own long coat, and cleaned the stillunconscious child's face with a loose corner of the cloth. "I am terribly sorry, little one," I heard him say before the bearers carried the child toward the encampment walls. The ugly man's kindness was more astonishing to me than Luke Anthony's cruelty had been. No one today has anything good to say concerning Sao Trentex. History remembers him as one of the fawning dilettantes about young Luke who abetted the soonto-be emperor's corruption. History and the rest of us never knew the real man. If he was capable of showing courage and compassion in defiance of Luke Anthony's irrational fury, I expect there were deep mines of virtue within the man he normally kept hidden lest he offend the unthinking power that throughout his short life was always just a few steps from his side. If the distance between him and Luke had been thousands of miles, if Sao Trentex had been a programmer in Poland or a farmer in North America, he might have been as good a man as Mathias aspired to be. Fate thought otherwise. He was doomed never to be far removed from that evil influence, and being as close as he was he had to be a slave to Luke Anthony's whims, as was everyone else near the willful young emperor. Since history has overlooked the goodness in the man, I pray some higher power-if any exists-took note of the luckless man's act of charity beside the chilly Amur and for that deed his soul is today in some better place than that of his thoughtless master.

  I did not leave my hiding place on the bridge till everyone in the hunting party had departed. The moment I could no longer hear the dogs yapping, I sped off the pontoon bridge and ran home. I told Helen what had happened by the river, and she tore her hair and threatened to take a rod to me. In the end she merely kissed my face a few dozen times and thanked her numerous gods I was well.

  "You see!" she said. "This is what happens when you go near the young emperor!"

  "I didn't," I said. "I was by the river. He came near me."

  Helen replied that everything in creation, or at least half of it, belonged to the emperor, and he could go anywhere he wanted on his property. The only safe place in the camp was our house.

  "He could squeeze you like a flea," she said, and pressed her fingernails together to demonstrate his power.

  For once, I nearly obeyed her. I still went for strolls along the river, but each time I left the encampment I made certain the coemperor was not out hunting game of either the four- or two-legged varieties.

  The army was gone the entire winter and did not return to Progress until the rain had changed to snow and back to rain once more. In the early spring the engineers appeared on the other shore and filled in the midsections of the bridges so the soldiers could return to our side of the Amur. The seemingly undiminished force returned largely on foot and brought in its train three thousand ragged Manchurian prisoners, most of them old people and children. There had been no great battles in the sandy hills. When report of our approaching soldiers had reached the isolated settlements in that desolate region of the globe, the majority of the clans who had been raiding southeastern Siberia simply retreated into China proper, leaving behind nothing of value for our soldiers to attack; yet somewhere in the field pack of some tired veteran the army carried home to us the sole important trophy they had won on the long and uneventful campaign: they brought to us the demon called the new metal plague. Every household in Progress sealed its doorway with caulk once the unwanted guest made itself known to us. People purified the air about them with antibiotic sprays and washed their metal possessions in soapy water and mild acids to keep the evil visitor from moving into their machinery. Helen claimed she had felt the plague in the wet soil of this strange country when we first arrived there. She believed it had traveled up the roots and into the trees, and that was why she had seen the unlucky signs in the wood ashes. She believed this although I explained to her the plague was clearly human-made.

  What we in Progress did not yet know was that this new curse was not a variation of the human-made virus we had seen corrode our metal goods during the previous forty years. That earlier plague had indeed been a virus; that is, it was a microscopic chain of proteins that excreted an acid capable of corroding metal surfaces. As nearly as the Empire's scientists could discern, some laboratory in southern Africa had created the old metal virus, which was one of the many designer germs and viruses that have afflicted humankind during the past 150 years. We in the PanPolarian Empire had contained the old metal virus by substituting plastics and ceramics for metals when we could, though metalloids and nonmetals from the upper right-hand corner of the periodic table make poor conductors of electricity. We had to coat our metal circuitry in heavy insulation, and even protected electrical systems had to be decontaminated every three or four days, which caused interruptions in communications and interfered with the functions of most computers. What had saved us from the old metal plague was that since it was a true virus it had mutated rather quickly and most of the newer varieties it became were no danger to our metal. Nonetheless, scientists in the Southern Hemisphere continue to create batches of the original metal virus, and it has become the primary reason the Empire (and the whole world) has become poorer and less technologically sophisticated over time. The new plague the army brought back from Manchuria was not a virus or even a living organism; it was in fact a nanomachine only three molecules in size. These tiny machines feed on negative energy, as is found in electricity, which the machines consume and convert into positrons. Normally these tiny machines lie dormant in the soil, feeding on the electrons in sunlight. But when they are in the vicinity of electricity coursing through metal structures, they latch onto the circuitry the way mosquitoes do blood veins. When infected with the new metal plague, machines grind to a halt, generators shut down, and those who have metal implants in their bodies wither away as if stricken by the plagues of the Middle Ages.

  That spring in Progress any neighbor with an electronic implant might in the morning be as healthy as a goat, by noon become as sluggish as someone walking in his sleep, and by evening be dead and as stiff as a carbon beam. When we first saw people die from it, we did not realize the new plague could not strike all humans, and we thought we too were in peril. Helen made me and her husband Medus wear amulets she claimed had been blessed at a temple of healing somewhere in Europe. Medus was as superstitious as his wife, and I was terrified by the bodies I every day saw being carried away for burial in the handcarts, so we did as she wanted. My father threw away the amulet she gave him. He vowed he would slay any plague demon that came for him with a flame thrower. He slept with such a weapon at his bedside, ready to strike at any virus daring to venture through our front doorway. Given our ignorance of the new affliction, we thought either the amulets or Father's threats must have worked, for when the deaths in the encampm
ent waned and in a few weeks ceased altogether, everyone in our household remained well. Our good emperor Mathias Anthony was less fortunate.

  Mathias fell ill soon after his return. For five days he lay on his bed in the great hall, fighting the affliction with all the remaining strength he had in the natural portions of his body. When his physicians told him he would become progressively weaker in spite of the decontamination work they had performed on him, he refused food and drink and prepared himself for an honorable death. On the sixth day of his ordeal he summoned groups of his generals and former students into his room to say good-bye to them.

  "Why are you weeping?" he asked his lieutenants. "You should be worrying about the plague and what it may yet do to you. Each of us is condemned to die on the day of our birth. My time is now. Take care yours does not come soon hereafter. I suspect this is something the Chinese have created. It has long been obvious that technology will be eventually used to destroy itself. I should have written a book upon the subject. But take heart: our civilization is more than electric lights and thinking machines. Learning, language, the arts, our medicine, our laws, our courage-these and much more will endure, and they will sustain our Empire in the long night to come."