The Martian General's Daughter

by Theodore Judson

  I was included among the students he called to his bedside. I waited in the deserted banquet hall for two hours while sobbing men entered and left his room. When it was my time, two enormous soldiers dressed in armor they had to move themselves, as it was no longer self-propelling, escorted me to his chamber. He was lying against the wall in his small cot, looking much paler and thinner than when I had seen him last. Like everyone else-including the tall soldiers-I wept when I beheld his wan, yellow face.

  "Shhh, Justa," he said in his weak voice. "This is the fate of mortal things. Do not grieve over what is fated to happen."

  I wanted to be brave for him. Instead I cried the more when I heard how frail he sounded.

  "I should be the one weeping," he said. "I will not live to see you blossom into a beautiful woman. Don't come too close, little one. We don't understand how infectious this thing is. I have another farewell gift for you. Over there."

  He pointed to a small table holding a jewelry box filled with golden combs I could wear in my long hair. On the box's casing was depicted the Judgment of Paris, showing Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, accepting the golden apple. I imagine the present was the emperor's kind comment upon my appearance.

  "Think of this old friend when you put on the combs," he said. "Most Just, you really must control yourself."

  We had been in Progress for nearly two years. I had turned fourteen in the meantime and was practically grown by the standards of the day. I was nonetheless weak in that terrible moment when I should have been as emotionless as a statue and insisted on weeping before the wasting emperor when he needed me to be strong.

  "What will you do when you are older, Justa?" he asked me.

  "I will ... serve the Empire ... however I can, my lord," I sputtered through my tears.

  Mathias turned his face to the wall. My answer had not pleased him.

  "You have been told I do not want to hear that sort of rubbish," he said.

  "I would say anything that would be pleasing to you, my lord," I told him.

  He turned back to me and motioned me to take another step closer to his bed.

  "Then say what is in your heart and not what you think I want to hear," he said. "An emperor hears many words intended to please him. That is our chief duty: hearing such words. People saying them do not necessarily know what I want to hear. I would have been more pleased, Most just, if you had said you wanted to lead a good and simple life, the sort of life that would belong to you and your family. You should marry a farmer, little one. They are honest people. Some of them are, anyway. Be a good wife and a good mother to a family of honest farmers. That would please me. I would have liked to have been a farmer myself."

  The import of what he was saying was lost on me in my sorrow. Nor could I stop weeping for him.

  "If you had not been our emperor," I said, "then, my lord, historians in ages hence would write that Pan-Polaria was deprived of her noblest, most valiant-"

  "Stop that, Justa," he told me. "Leave us for a moment, friends," he said to the soldiers. When he and I were alone in the chamber he said to me in a whisper that carried plainly to me ears, "Child, historians ages hence will write the same nonsense they have always written. They will most likely say I was a good ruler, that I saved the Empire from several invasions and did not completely destroy the economy. They will add I made my one great error when I made Luke Spacious my successor. Don't be shocked, Justa. I know better than anyone what sort of man Luke is, and I have imagination enough to guess what evil he will do after I am gone and there is no one to restrain him. His mother raised him to be exactly the sort of ... the sort of thing he is. She and the crowd of sycophants she put about him did a thorough job. I could not improve upon her work. Know this, my child: I came not to care what he has become. There once was a time I thought I could educate him, education being the last depot the train called failure usually stops at. In later years I considered raising another man outside my family to be the next emperor, as my immediate predecessors have done. Then, four years ago I returned to Garden City and found him and several of his friends sitting on the palace steps like idlers in front of a convenience store; it was morning and they looked to have been out all night on the streets of the capital, dressed as they were in their heavy cloaks and hoods. He was only fourteen. The gang of them, they had a sack full of something they did not wish me to inspect. I had a squadron of soldiers with me, of course; they retrieved the bag for me, and inside there were the most hideous bits of animal life they had collected during the night, the whole of it cut up in a bloody mess: a cat's head, a dog's hind leg, and such. When I poured it all out on the ground, there was a child's severed hand amid the other gore. The soldiers and I were aghast. We looked at them and wondered. And they, the little murderers, they could only cower like cowards before me. `This,' I told myself, `is the Empire we have fought a hundred wars to preserve. PanPolaria's story was endured to produce this.' I walked away from him and returned to the frontier without staying another hour in the capital. Two years later I named him my coemperor. Leaving him to the Empire and the Empire to him will be the most just deed I have ever done. PanPolaria will have the master she has long deserved.

  "Now, Justa, your father, General Black, is over fifty-five. He may retire from the army any time he wishes. Tell him to settle somewhere far from the capital. We are losing control of more outer regions every week. The farther away from Garden City he settles, the better it will be for you and for him. Someplace in the far north of America will do. You will meet your farmer husband there; there you can teach your children to aspire for nothing more than to be farmers and farmers' wives. Never, never, little one, should you or anyone in your family go again to Garden City. Never. Now good-bye, pretty one, and do not mourn for me."

  I hid my face and wept as I ran from the room. I was so distraught I forgot to bow to him before I exited. The soldiers posted at the doorway were shedding tears as plentiful as mine. I knew they were weeping both for the great goodness about to depart the Earth and for the calamity that was to befall us when Luke Spacious took Mathias's place.

  Mathias the Glistening died on the seventh day of his affliction. Because Luke Anthony was in the emperor's bedchamber when Mathias left us, the rumormongers have claimed the young emperor strangled his father. I know this is a lie, for Mathias's bodyguards never left his side while Luke was present. After the news of Mathias's death had spread through the encampment, Luke called the senior officers together at the great hall and addressed them and the Empire via a hazy satellite transmission.

  "Our daddy," he said, putting both his hands over his heart and casting his eyes skyward, "has gone to heaven to sit among the other emperors as a god. He has left us to govern the world while he is away"

  Luke told the world the army units were to return to their various provinces, and he, the sole emperor, was returning to Garden City to bury his father. The Manchurian war was officially over.

  My father told us while we packed our belongings at our house that night that the new emperor had cut quite a figure for an eighteen-yearold boy.

  "He's a handsome lad," said Father. "The ladies back in Garden City are going to love him. Somebody has to. Of course I will serve him as best I can. That's what his father would have wanted me to do, and Mathias is the one who lifted me up in the world. I won't betray him just because he's no longer here to keep an eye on me."

  could be a leader after Mathias's example, if I trusted our friend Mr. Golden and did as he wants," said Father as Mica gave him his morning massage. "I would be a friend to the poor and a champion to the weak, and so on."

  Father meant well when he said this. I could have pointed out to him he thought being a friend to the poor meant giving them positions in the army and that for Father being a champion to the weak consisted of using the combat divisions to ward off potential invaders. That an emperor might do other things, such as reform our corrupt judicial system or break the power of the commodities speculators, wa
s beyond the limits of his imagination. Rather than contradict him, I said, "Do you remember when we last saw Selin in Garden City?"

  "How could anyone forget any time he crossed tracks with that one?" asked Father. "The bristle-headed bastard was frightened then. He was in a crazy snit, like he always is, but he was scared to death of Luke Anthony That may have been the only time anybody has seen him scared."

  There had been a time when Father had feared Luke Anthony too. I did not challenge him on that point either.

  The soldiers and laborers in the tunnels outside our quarters had been quiet during the night following the arrival of Mr. Golden's messengers. The men had not been chanting Father's name, but Mr. Golden's men had brought plenty of money to pay the local merchants to keep the beer flowing to the troopers and miners, and the good feelings toward "Emperor" Black lived on in the hangovers of the morning after.

  "Would you return to Garden City, sir?" I asked.

  He shook his head. If we could see the thoughts of others, I would have seen Father's imperial ambitions fleeing out the door while he contemplated the dangers of that distant city.

  "Only if I went there to retire forever," he said, and looked into space at a scene only he could see. "To go to the capital when called is to risk death. To stay there is to decide to die. Travel across the solar system is becoming so hazardous, anyway, because of the tiny machines. Do you recall the first time Luke Anthony ..."

  He did not finish the question. Father looked at the scene before him and was lost to me for a moment. I knew what he was contemplating.

  hen Young Luke Anthony ended the Chinese campaign, Father and his household returned to the Middle East in what was once the nation of Turkey, and there he again commanded troops opposite the Iranian frontier. In addition to his military duties, the emperor in Garden City made Father a tribune of the courts, and Father had to thrust himself into legal as well as military matters. As was required of his new office, Father became directly involved in suits well-connected provincial officials were bringing against hapless local debtors. At that time and in those circumstances, there could not have been a more inappropriate choice for this new position than my father. Court cases bored him; these legal disputes involved property and financial obligations, both of which were alien concepts to Father, a habit-bound and nearly propertyless sol dier. Father had never dealt with anyone other than men-at-arms since he had been old enough to shave with a laser blade. He took the job assuming that citizens obeyed rules as soldiers did, and when he decided that a disputant in a case had strayed from the letter of the law, Father would at once give judgment to the cheater's opponent, which meant that in an extraordinary number of cases he decided in favor of the lowborn debtors and against the well-connected moneylenders, tax farmers, and petty government officials appearing before him. The courts would have tolerated Father's behavior in Mathias's time; back then justice and fairness were supposed to have some weight in a tribune's judgments. During the reign of Luke Anthony, when the magistrates and other provincial officials were either favorites of the emperor's court or had purchased their positions directly from the throne, Father's actions quickly earned him the disfavor of the powerful back in the capital. The emperor's cronies had expected the courts to let them steal anything in the provinces they wanted-the same as other tribunes of the court in other provinces allowed the powerful to do; Father was so unworldly he thought he was supposed to protect the weak. "You have been charging usurious rates," he told more than one moneylender; "this poor fellow should keep his land." The wronged shysters were quick to send missives to Garden City that complained of Father's good deeds in Turkey. The new emperor might have had Father eliminated straightaway were it not for the renewed Iranian threat on the border, a threat the Empire needed experienced officers to fight in that time of faltering technology and constricting imperial power. Poverty doubly protected Father. He owned only a small house in the Field of Heroes back in Garden City, and the emperor would profit little if he killed Father and seized everything he had.

  The foreign raiders then making forays across the mountainous country around Lake Van were mounted forces attacking Pan-Polarian settlements and native cities as far west as the Mediterranean coast. In the early months of their forays they used motorcycles and hovercraft, but as those too succumbed to the new metal plague they became the cavalry forces their ancestors had been in ancient times. They struck and quickly raced back to their homelands after they had stolen everything they could carry with them. Whether entering or leaving our territories they did their best to avoid the Pan-Polarian army. Armed with primitive rifles made of wood and steel and obviously more mobile than our men, the Iranians were invincible in the open desert south of Turkey's mountains. They were far more vulnerable on the broken ground and in the heavily populated Anatolian hill country, where the still-fertile soil had attracted many new farmers in recent decades. Father called the raiders "nomads" because of the rootless way they fought, though actually the Iranians are a highly civilized people living in the great cities that used to belong to the caliph of Baghdad before Pan-Polaria invaded that region 140 years earlier.

  "We have to catch the nomads in places they can't jump around," Father explained to me. "Get them in the mountain passes or out in the muddy fields the farmers have along the rivers or in among the houses of the towns. Hill country and woodlands are other good spots to tear up the silver-scaled bastards. What good is their speed then, eh? If they fall on us in open country, we have to close ranks in our body armor and march to where the land favors us. The nomads can't hurt us as long as we move in unison. Their old-fashioned bullets can't penetrate our armor, you see. When they charge our ranks they can't protect themselves, you understand. They're not in armor like we are. If they stop and shoot at us from a distance, they're wasting their time. We have only to fight them in places that favor us. I was there when we burned their capitals down, missy. Did I ever tell you about that?"

  I had to tell him often he had already related to me the sacking of Teheran and Qom many times before.

  "The nomads need to take care," Father told me, "or we'll do it again."

  The Pan-Polarian army holding the frontier against the Iranian intrusions belonged more to the frontier than it did to Garden City. Few of the men serving in the ranks under Father's command still had any blood of the Empire's founders in them. Since the time of Blando the Wayward, some two hundred years before, the soldiers of the army had been the sons of professional soldiers married to wives they had found near the military stations, and they were no longer the citizen-soldiers the military had been made of during early imperial times. The men in Turkey had, like their fathers, taken up with local women and were raising the next generation of soldiers in the unofficial families in the ghettos packed close to the military station at Van City's four walls. The men had each enlisted at age nineteen and served for thirty years; should they survive until retirement, they would wed their unofficial wives in a civil ceremony and would thereafter continue to live near their old bases and to serve the army as teamsters, farmers, or as the various types of engineers and artisans the military needs to survive in this time of reduced industrial capacity. While most of the old hands in and around the base called themselves Pan-Polarians, they had adopted local customs and spoke a language that contained some English and Syntalk words and much other vocabulary that came from local tongues or from the languages of the traders who frequented the base. A large portion of Father's army was completely alien in origin, and a large portion of those foreign men were from the various Muslim tribes-the very people the Empire had sometimes fought against. Even in Turkey and the other Asian provinces on the remote southern edges of the Empire one could find thousands of tall men in turbans serving as mercenaries for Pan-Polaria and still calling themselves Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans, or Turkmen. Mixed into these infantrymen were also the increasingly common Mexican cavalry, the German artillerymen, and the odd contingents of North American sharpshoo
ters, Slavic heavy infantry, and of course the Boers, the people who had no country and took their families with them to the frontier; this last tribe went wherever the Empire sent the banners of its divisions. The Tenth, the finest fighting unit in the army and thus in the world, the celebrated mobile unit that protected the heartland of North America-the most valuable place in the Empire because of the food it produces-could not have taken the field minus its dour Boer contingents. So it was for Father's army in Turkey. If only the men of pure Pan-Polarian blood from North America, the place the Empire was born, served in the Turkish army, Father would have gone into battle with himself and perhaps ten senior officers to lead. Had his charges been limited to those men who had ever set foot on American soil, Father would have had left from the thirty thousand at Van City only himself and a few hundred others.

  Whenever I walked with my father through the encampment at Van City we could take a hundred steps and hear a dozen different languages and look upon men from that many different lands. The officers and sergeants used a modified Syntalk to communicate with their men, as everyone in the East knows at least a portion of that tongue. The words they use in the languages they speak lack tenses and conjugations and articles of any sort. "Man see many house yesterday," was how a sample sentence might run, and the speaker would pat himself on the chest to show he was the man who saw the houses. Each tribe of soldiers had its own food in camp-baked potatoes and beef for those having any American blood, thick beer and overcooked sausages for the Europeans, mounds of cracked and bleached grains for the Muslims-and each group had its own collection of gods. The men set small idols of clay and metal in front of their houses to protect them from death in battle and from the new epidemics that periodically swept through every army post. The men called their squat, mud-brown idols Minit, the Lady of Flowers, Sraosha, and Llyr. They each said their particular idols were the most powerful because they, the dutiful worshipers, remained alive after so many of the others they had served with had perished. Few in the camp, and almost none among the generals, worshiped the old Christian God, the one in three their great-grandfathers had adored in ages past. Nor did any among them mention the ancient stories their grandparents had used as literary metaphors and that their earlier ancestors had lived by.