The Martian General's Daughter

by Theodore Judson

  The most popular deity among the senior officers in Father's Turkish camp was the Eastern god Invictus, "the Unconquerable," and the reasoning behind their devotion to this bloody god was more social than spiritual in nature. The officers considered the savage religion of Invictus a manly cult, one suitable for soldiers, and since the men in the army had nothing else in common, their commanders hoped the troops might accept the new religion as the dominant martial faith. The recently crowned emperor in distant Garden City was of the same opinion. Luke Anthony had ordered the construction of Invictus's temples in military stations throughout the Empire, including a squat, rectangular one without windows at Father's base at Van City; the emperor had paid for priests to evangelize the men, and had let it be known that he too was a devotee of the invincible deity and would be pleased with those who believed as he did. As a female, I could not enter the cult's temple: Invictus's followers necessarily had to be men, for in our time gods discriminate as readily as humans do. From what Father told me I knew that before initiation into the group's sacred mysteries acolytes were given generous servings of strong drink while the priest told them the first secret of their religion, namely, that Invictus had emerged from the Great Egg of Creation holding the Sword of Truth and the Torch of Enlightenment, which I am sure sounds about right to men eager to believe in anything; then the priest put the new believer into a windowless room and made him stare into a barrel filled with water until the man's senses were befuddled. In the last act of the initiation rite, the older members of the sect would baptize the new man in the blood of a bull; the drunk, disoriented, and blindfolded soldier would be made to lie beneath a heavy metal grate onto which a live bull was led and sacrificed by the priest, who would slit the bull's throat in imitation of Invictus's slaying of a holy white bull in one of the religion's earliest myths. The shower of warm, reeking blood had a powerful effect upon the young man cowering beneath the grate. (It was invariably a young man. An older man would not do such things.) If the soldier did not go mad during the ceremony, he was certain to be permanently altered by the experience. My father considered the manly cult a great farce, yet he was tolerant of what went on inside the unimpressive-looking temple. The blood, he said, "scared the mischief out of the lads." The blood did not, however, scare the other gods out of them. The new believers crawled from beneath the grates and added Invictus's image to the idols of Minit, the Lady of Flowers, Sraosha, and Llyr, and added another superstition to their old ones.

  Money and terror were what really held the army together as the Empire grew weaker. Should the men not be paid on time, as happened more than once during Luke Anthony's rule, they might kill their officers and pillage the countryside to make up the lost wages. My father forestalled any rebellion among the army of Turkey with constant drill, constant movement, and the most severe discipline in the Empire. The men respected his harsh leadership as much as they respected his humble origins in the ranks of the infantry. They knew Father now made a fire in front of his house as they did in front of their homes and that he ate no better food than the lowliest soldier did. Father was to his soldiers a relic from the past, a reminder of the traditions the troopers' grandfathers had taught them when they were children living outside the military stations. When the men came to our home and demanded liquor to celebrate the New Year or the summer holidays, Father would give them vinegar instead of wine. If the men grew tired from marching and demanded water, Father would point in the direction of the nearest river. Should they demand more money on payday because the currency had been devaluated again, Father would brandish his sidearm and tell them, "You will have to go over me to get it!" The men loved his toughness. During the Iranian campaign alone there were a dozen occasions when the troops would have butchered a sympathetic general the first time he gave in to them. Father knew this single great truth: soldiers obey leaders who demand more of them than could be reasonably expected, and his men knew no leader demanded more than General Black.

  During the fighting against the Iranian raiders Garden City had ordered Father not to pursue the enemy deep into their territories. Luke Anthony wanted victories; given the developing realities of the Empire, he did not want to spend the money or lives necessary to gain them. We were fortunate that the rough country on the Turkish frontier exhausts all who dare cross its mountains with heat and thirst in summer and terrible cold in winter. The land thus provides a natural defense against any invasion coming from the flatlands lying to its south. Father first tried fortifying the mountain passes on the border lands, hoping to catch the Iranian attackers from ambush. The enemy reacted to this plan by riding around the forti- fled positions and crossing the high ground as best they could, even if that meant going right over the highest, snowcapped peaks. From this preliminary failure to trap his opponents Father would stumble-with my assistance-onto a strategy that would eventually defeat his more mobile enemy. To cross the frosty mountain wastelands where there was no clear trail and food and fodder were hard to obtain, the Iranians came to depend upon local tribesmen to guide them along the safest routes. I realized Father could in turn bribe the native people to lead the enemy into traps we had set for them along the way. Early in the morning or late in the evening the bribed tribesmen would guide the unsuspecting and very tired enemy cavalry between two ranks of hiding Pan-Polaric infantry. At a broadcast signal (for we still had radios then) our men would shower the horsemen in baggy trousers with hundreds of carbon filament sabots, cutting them to pieces before they could react. Any raiders our infantry did not slay with the first volley could be pursued into the high ground by our Mexican horsemen mounted on fresh steeds or strafed by the handful of aircraft Father kept on isolated bases where they would be removed (for a time) from the new metal plague. After two score of these ambushes Father quickly became the most successful general on that portion of the frontier, and Turkey became the safest border province in the Empire. News of General Black's numerous small victories had to have reached the capital via the news reports made by the Portus Network, the last of the television broadcasters operating in the Middle East. Perhaps these successes were something of a counterbalance to his judicial honesty on the emperor's scales of injustice, and we were left alone for a time.

  My father imperiled his somewhat favorable position within the emperor's court by writing a letter to Garden City that suggested the emperor extend the terms of every provincial judge and governor to five years. Father reasoned that too many administrators and officers of the courts made a quick fortune in the Empire's far reaches, usually by buying debts or farming taxes, and went home before they had to deal with the consequences of their actions. Father wrote he wanted experienced men, ones able to spend some time in the areas they had been assigned to, and no more of the vultures who fattened upon the poor before flying home to their villas near the capital. Father knew long-term appointments worked in the army. He never was able to understand that the ways of the civilian world were infinitely more complex than military life. Father assumed the emperor would at once see the common sense in the letter's proposals. Father had given so little thought to the dangers he was courting he did not tell anyone on his staff that he had sent the letter until the day after he had handed the missive to an airplane courier bound for the capital. He was having a conference with Harriman-then a young man in his late twenties and already my father's chief lieutenant-when he let drop in an offhanded way what he had written to Luke Anthony.

  "You have killed yourself!" exclaimed Harriman.

  "Stuff," laughed Father. "I'm being a good servant to the emperor. I made the same suggestion to his late father once, and he did me no harm. These highfalutin folks in Garden City need our level-headed counsel now and then, don't you know? I wouldn't be surprised if the boy didn't give me another promotion."

  "Sir, please, sir," Harriman begged him, "you have to send a secure radio message to the courier! If he doesn't turn back to us, get a fighter to shoot him down! Whatever you have to do, that man can'
t reach Garden City. The emperor cannot read that letter! Don't you realize these administrators you are criticizing bought their positions from Luke Anthony's hand? Stealing from the provincials and hurrying home is precisely what they came out here to do!"

  "Young man, I realize the emperor can be a violent lad. Some of his friends are outright thugs, I'll give you that. But you're now saying he is a common thief," said Father, who never understood anything as quickly as he should have. "I would remind you this is Mathias the Glistening's son you are slandering! There has to be some decency in him. Besides, I am only doing my duty. My experience has been that if a soldier does his duty, then everything works out for the best."

  He concluded the conference by telling Harriman his treasured anecdote of the time he killed a giant crocodile on the Nile in Egypt.

  "There he was," said Father, demonstrating to the bewildered junior officer how he had drawn his pistol on the ungainly beast. "He was as big as two lions laid end to end and had a mouth as wide as a theater's front door, and he was coming right into the boat for me! `It's you or me,' I told him, `and trust me: it is going to be you!"'

  Two months later Father received a letter demanding he come to Garden City for a private conference with the emperor. His staff looked upon this epistle as a notice of Father's death. They held a banquet for him the day he was preparing to leave; each senior officer came to Father's dining table in the officers' mess to bid him farewell, as though my father were about to be executed in the morning. They were certain they would never again see him alive. The older men thanked him for the discipline and the exacting example he had established in the East. The younger ones, such as poor Harriman, wept when it was their turn to bid Father good-bye.

  "None of this, boys," Father told them, and ordered more beer to lighten the mood in the room. "I'm only off to have a chat with the emperor. He probably wants me to talk to his people-I mean the administrators, the chamberlains, the whatyoucallthems and the whatnotsabout this fine idea of mine. You won't be rid of old General Black yet. That I guarantee you."

  "We will miss you, sir," bawled Harriman.

  "Let us act like men!" demanded Father. "The son of Mathias Anthony is not the big thinker his father was. I'll allow that. I know he's fond of hunting and rough athletic stuff, like boys tend to be. I've hunted myself. I killed a crocodile on the Nile, you know. I'll tell him about that. It'll give us a common ground to stand on, put him in the right frame of mind. I don't know if I've ever told you lads that story," he said to his men. "There he was, the big, warty brute, ready to swallow me whole, and I said to him: `As long as I have a good Pan-Polarian firearm in my hand you'll not sink your foreign teeth into me!"'

  I was seated behind Father's sofa with his household servants and was able to whisper into his ear that he had told his officers this same story only a few days before.

  Three years earlier, after his father's death at Progress, the new emperor had ridden into Garden City in a golden hovercraft led by a thousand naked Chinese in golden chains while he kissed his friend Sao Trentex full on the lips to scandalize the populace on the first day of his reign. On the second day of his rule Luke Anthony had withdrawn into his rambling palace and into a personal domain of athletic contests and sexual indulgence. He left governing the Empire to Sao Trentex, whom he had named his chief chamberlain. Anyone who had hoped young Luke would evolve into anything similar to his father quickly had their eyes opened to his true personality. Luke had found the treasury depleted by his father's military campaigns and by the decline in the economy the metal plagues had caused, so he raised a quick surplus by selling state offices and by seizing the estates of certain wealthy citizens close at hand in North America. His method was to charge a rich man he hated with conspiracy, have the accused killed before the man could flee to the Southern Hemisphere, and seize the dead man's land and money as an additional penalty for his alleged crime. As Luke Anthony should have anticipated, his methods soon gave birth to a real conspiracy against him. A nobleman named Fourthman, who was a grand nephew of Mathias the Glistening, and Lucilla, Mathias's elder sister and the new emperor's aunt, met secretly with Pedro Tarantella, the general of the City Guardsmen (the soldiers protecting the emperor and Garden City itself), and they chose Lucilla's stepson, one Claude Pompeianus the Fifth, a hotheaded young nobleman, for the task of putting a bullet in Luke before the new emperor could murder again. The young hothead made a terrible muff of the attempted assassination. One morning while the emperor was exercising with his athlete friends on one of the grassy fields within the palace grounds, some City Guardsmen the conspirators had paid off allowed the bold Claude Pompeianus to approach Luke from behind while the emperor was taking a rest on a bench. Pompeianus had drawn his gun and was set to fire the weapon into Luke's back. At the last moment the idiot paused to make a proclamation like an actor upon the stage. "This bullet the Senate sends you!" he announced. He must have thought it an apt, indeed a courageous statement for him to make. Luke of course heard him and sprang away swiftly while a half dozen of his beefy friends jumped on Pompeianus before he got around to doing what he was proclaiming he was about to do. After unspeakable tortures administered in the bowels of the palace, the would-be assassin gave the names of his associates. Fourthman, Lucilla, Tarantella, Pompeianus, and hundreds of others who had known of the plot were either at once put to death or exiled to distant lands and put to death at a later time. In the midst of this abortive coup, the emperor's friend and chamberlain Sao Trentex ended up lying in a slum street with his throat slit; perhaps Pedro Tarantella's men had killed him as part of the plot to seize power, or perhaps his old friend Luke Anthony had simply grown bored with the pockmarked man. No one knew for certain. The emperor found a new City Guardsmen commander in the dreadful Jerome Perlman, a man capable of committing murder as thoughtlessly as most men breathe. He had given the same thug all the powers the late Sao Trentex had formerly held. Luke Anthony had then retreated farther into his private indulgences. In the center of his palace he kept a harem of three hundred beautiful women and three hundred equally pretty young boys; when one of these lost souls displeased him, his or her body would be found the next day in the smoldering waste heaps outside the city limits. Every day Luke killed an unarmed convict in hand-tohand combat to perfect his fighting skills and to get his blood up for when he visited himself upon his women and pretty boys. Killing with his own hands also eased the emperor's fear of the conspirators he could discern lurking in the darkened hallways and garden enclosures he wandered among during all the daylight hours and during the night when he could not sleep. This was the man with whom my father fancied he could have a constructive little chat concerning provincial government officials.

  My father and his small household flew in a functioning plane to Guadalajara, as security prohibited any craft entering the airspace above the capital city. Thence we traveled on a train south to Garden City and its sprawling suburbs and slums of forty million people. As soon as he reached the inner city Father strolled across the Imperial Plaza to the palace gates without stopping to visit his long-unvisited wife at their home on the Field of Heroes. The servants and I stopped to wait for him near the palace in a small park in which a later emperor would eventually build the gigantic bathhouse that would be one of the Empire's last great public buildings.

  "I'll be out in a couple hours," Father told us.

  He presented himself to the City Guardsmen standing at the front gates by showing them his credentials. The soldiers would have normally run a DNA scan on him, but the government's central computers were no longer in use. The guards led him inside to an antechamber and told him to sit beside another gentleman awaiting an imperial audience.

  "You don't understand," Father told the men, and showed them the rings and the insignia bearing the markings of his rank. "I am General Peter Justice Black, the commander of the emperor's Turkish army. I have a letter from Luke Anthony himself summoning me-"

  "Sit!" the City Guardsm
en told him.

  Father realized the men ordering him about were mere City Guardsmen in fancy chromium armor and not, in his opinion, real soldiers. A couple of the men were Canadians straight from the north country, which in Father's mind showed what miscreants the whole bunch of them were. The white marble antechamber they wanted him to remain in was many rooms away from the palace's central halls and living quarters, where the emperor undoubtedly was that afternoon. Father thought the men would be showing him a smidgen of proper respect if they let him wait someplace closer to the imperial presence.

  "See here," he told them, "I want one of you to go-"

  Four of the City Guardsmen pulled their sidearms on him.

  "Listen, Grandpa," one of the guards said to him, "sit here and keep your mouth shut, or you'll be dead sooner than the emperor wants."

  Father was more shocked at their insolence than he was frightened by their threats. In his heart he wished he had these men under his command in the East; he would teach them how to talk to a general then! He knitted his eyebrows at the reprobates, and he sat on the stone ledge beside the other waiting man because he was confident he would eventually make these pretend soldiers regret their actions. The guards took the pistol from Father's side and strolled into the palace's labyrinthine interior, laughing among themselves about "hicks from the provinces."