"What the blazes is going on here?" Father asked the man sitting next to him. "The dolts didn't so much as salute me!"
The man he spoke to was a silver-haired gentleman of approximately sixty years. While he had a nobleman's clean, uncalloused hands, he was dressed down for this appearance in the palace. He wore an unbleached linen suit minus a necktie of party affiliation and had recently removed the rings of office from his fingers. Father could see where the bands had left their impressions. Upon hearing him speak, Father thought he recognized the man from somewhere.
"I do not know anything concerning these goings-on in the capital," said the man. "I am merely an olive farmer from southern Texas."
"I think I know you, sir," said Father. "Aren't you connected to Pius Anthony? You are his nephew, or grandnephew perhaps? I saw you in the court of Mathias the Glistening when he visited Egypt."
"No!" insisted the man, whose mouth had twitched when Father said the name "Pius Anthony." "I am an olive farmer, sir," said the stranger. "As I told the City Guardsmen: I have never been to Garden City before. Were the computers up today, they would see I have no DNA records on file. I'm no one."
"Then you look like somebody I once met, good sir," said Father, sounding as apologetic as he was capable of sounding. "I meant nothing. Aren't these damned Guardsmen a wonder? I will have to put a bee in the young emperor's ear about them when I get in to see him. Get these louts into apple-pie order then!"
The man was too frightened to make a reply to Father. He looked at the inlaid ceiling and the four walls and floor made of the eerie pale marble and pretended he was someplace else. The palace audio system was still in use that day. Like all modern systems, it used directed beams of sound, and if Father moved himself a few inches in the antechamber he would hear a different stream of music. At first he was amused by this bit of technology we no longer have on the frontier, but after an hour of shifting about his hard perch the changing sound only gave Father a headache.
Many more hours passed. Through the chamber's high, solitary window crept less and less sunlight as the evening came on and the shadows grew longer. Outside, an orange sun was setting on the smoggy city. No one came into the room to summon either waiting man. A couple of the emperor's Canadian Guardsmen drifted in and out of the antechamber, talking to each other in their throaty version of Syntalk. When Father called to them, using vocabulary he knew they would recognize, they made filthy gestures to him rather than attempt to give a civil answer. A third man-obviously a courier from the Senate, because he carried a bundle of documents bearing the seal of that august body-entered the room, and he too was made to sit on the polished stone bench with Father.
At dusk a group of six Canadians emerged from the interior maze and approached the three men on the bench. Without warning or pronouncement of any sort, one of them drew his pistol and shot the courier with a smart bullet that swirled about the interior of the unfortunate man's skull before it exploded. Father would describe it to me as "a nasty barbarian's round, nothing like a regular Pan-Polarian soldier would use." Blood and gore splattered everywhere, across the white marble floor, onto the white walls, and onto Father and the other man. The papers the unlucky man had been carrying fell onto the floor and sopped up a portion of the flowing puddle of red.
Father jumped to his feet, but the Guardsmen pointed their weapons at him and motioned for him to sit. "Nah, Greatfader, nah," they said till he again took his place on the bloody bench. They dragged the unfortunate messenger's body into an adjoining hallway, leaving a trail of smeared gore behind them. The right side of Father's face and his pristine white officer's dress uniform were covered with the same red mess. The man on his left, the self-proclaimed olive farmer, remained seated and kept his eyes fixed straight in front of him during the entire atrocity.
"This is madness!" shouted Father after the guards. "The emperor will hear of this!"
He would have then left the palace if there had not been armed men posted at the room's exits.
A few moments later, the Canadians and several of the regular City Guardsmen, one of them an officer, reentered the chamber. The officer was berating the northmen and went so far as to slap one of them on his shiny helmet. The great lumbering Canadians hung their heads and looked as sorrowful as schoolboys caught talking out of turn by the headmaster.
"That was the wrong one, you cabbage heads!" the officers yelled at them. "That was a bloody messenger from the Senate! You know: papers? Carry papers?" he said, and pantomimed the act of carrying paper documents under his arm. The Canadians looked at him in uncomprehending passivity. "You damned savages don't know anything!" he concluded.
The Canadians pointed to Father and to the olive farmer. They were asking without speaking: "Which one, then?"
"One is the posh you were supposed to whack and the other is some idiot general from the boondocks," said the officer. "Who can tell the difference?"
"We could kill them both," suggested one of the City Guardsmen.
"In time, we might," said the officer. "The emperor wants to speak to the idiot general first. Your hands, gentlemen," he said to Father and the other man.
The officer boldly grabbed a hand from each man and examined their palms.
"See here!" protested Father. "I am General Peter Justice Black-"
"Your name's not worth dirt here, old man," said the officer. "Shut up, or we'll give you something worth complaining about. See here," he said to his companions as he held up Father's palm, "this big-mouthed, sunburnt chap has got paws like a lobster. I'll wager he's pitched camp from here to north China. Drilled with the range finder and rifle all the live long day. This is our general. This other sod, old rosy fingers, he's the one we want."
At that a Guardsman stepped forward and dispatched the man beside Father with a single conventional bullet in the heart. The Guardsmen dragged his body away as they had the courier's, leaving Father sitting between two pools of blood and thinking he was having an insane dream.
The dusk turned to night. The slanted light coming through the high window disappeared, and the general sat on the bench alone. Some Canadians came and went from the palace's inner apartments; once, when they espied Father sitting by himself amid the blood, they laughed and drew a finger across their throats.
My father died his first death as he sat there waiting for the end to come from the shadows at the edges of the white room. His years of selfdiscipline, his military acclaim, and the strength of his good right arm were of no use to him there. He had confronted eternity many times before on the battlefield; then he had held his energy weapon in his hand and his comrades were about him. In the most dangerous straits he had always felt he would decide what would happen to himself. "Let the devils have at me," he had thought back then. "I may die or I may kill; but either way the bastards will not see the back of Peter Black." In the antechamber he was less than the flies buzzing through the slanted light beams before they were devoured by the palace's mechanical insect predators. The guards could murder him as easily as they took a sip of water or stepped across the floor. His unusable strength and courage in that moment of utter hopelessness only served to make Father yet more ridiculous. He felt a pain in his chest that was like a missile going into him as the Guardsman's bullet had gone into the man who sat beside him. While he continued to sit in the darkness, Father's mouth slowly came open and his limbs became heavy, so heavy he thought he would not be able to move himself ever again.
After midnight the City Guardsman officer and his men appeared in the chamber and told Father to leave.
"The emperor is in bed," he said. "Come back tomorrow, Grandpa. He'll have plenty of time for you then."
The officer and his men laughed at Father when the old man pulled himself onto his benumbed legs and fell to his hands and feet as he struggled toward the outside. The servants and I met him in the park, and hired a taxi to carry Father to the home of his legitimate wife. Propriety kept me from entering his house. Helen and I took lod
ging at a nearby inn, while Medus stayed with his master. From our second-story room we could see the outside lights burning in the peristyle around the garden behind Father's little house. In the small hours before dawn we saw his two legitimate sons come through the deserted streets to visit his bedside. When the sun had nearly risen, the wealthy fuel factor Mr. Andrew Golden arrived at the house in a limousine accompanied by four bodyguards. From our vantage point we clearly saw Medus bow to the rich man on the illuminated street and lead him through the front door of Father's house.
In the first hour of daylight the household servants and I drove Father back to the palace in another taxi. Shame prevented him from speaking to us the entire long journey. The first of the merchants from the city's outlying suburbs were moving onto the abandoned city streets that by law are free of commerce through the night because one could travel after curfew in the city only with a special permit.
"They'll be selling generators and bread and old computers in the street bazaars today," I told Father as he leaned against sturdy Medus in the backseat, for there was a weakness in his entire right side. "I promise you will be there to see it."
The City Guardsmen at the gate at once conducted Father into the central palace complex to the throne room in which the emperor awaited. Not only did Father not have to wait on that second day, the guards allowed Medus to assist Father after they had entered the front gate. Father later told me the emperor was lying on a large sofa surrounded by a host of his pretty girls; a small fountain containing red liquid narcotics and powered by a subterranean engine was sending up a steady mushroom of crimson beside his sofa. The room was made to resemble a spot in the jungle that morning, and there were realistic holograms of dense foliage and calling birds all around the emperor. Luke Anthony was amusing himself by ladling the red liquid from the fountain with a crystal bowl; he took only a few sips each time he filled the vessel and splattered the rest on the members of his harem, who had to endure his abuse without making a syllable of protest. The young ruler of the northern world was naked but for the silk sash he had draped across his loins. His hair and body were sprinkled with gold dust that made the young man's tanned body shimmer like a trout in a mountain stream when he moved his muscular limbs.
"General Peter Black," he said to Father, "I know I wanted you to do something for me. I can't remember what."
He told Father to stay in Garden City while he thought of some chore for him to perform. Having reached this decision he raised an imperial hand and sent Father away so the game of humiliating his concubines might continue.
Earlier, before the sun had risen, Mr. Golden the fuel speculator had sent a large sum of money to Jerome Perlman, the creature in charge of the City Guardsmen, thereby securing Father's safety, at least for a while. Within the course of a fortnight, Father's sons had divorced their first wives and married Mr. Golden's plain but available daughters, giving Golden a connection to a family that contained the commander of one of the emperor's field armies. It was a disgraceful bargain, but none of us could, under the circumstances, have thought of a better one.
I was not allowed to attend the weddings. Not that I regret that slight. I was thankful Father's wife let me come to the house in the Field of Heroes and allowed me to tend to the stricken general. She had guessed who I was but endured me if the rest of the legitimate family continued to think I was a servant like Helen and Medus. Her indulgence meant I could feed Father and change his bedclothes and not be turned from the door.
It was during this time of recuperation that Father became the lessaggressive, softer-spoken, and weaker man he would be for the rest of his life. While he recovered from the great fright he had suffered on his first day at the palace, he constantly needed someone at his bedside. Father lay awake most hours of the day and night, repeatedly checking his heartbeat and proclaiming "It is good" or "It is bad." The strange tingling sensation in his right side persisted for months afterward. Sometimes the feeling would become so strong that Father would sit upright in his bed and call for someone to help him. If no one happened to be near him in one of those moments of crisis, Father would cry out in panic that assassins were near. The physicians said his psychological nature had become unbalanced and they saw no chance for improvement until Father's state of reason had been restored. Helen declared that the doctors knew nothing about medicine and said Father's blood was running too hot through his brain; she showed me how to put cool wet cloths on his forehead to relieve the fever inside him. Whether her folk methods helped him or not, I cannot say. I do know I took great comfort in doing something for him, and in being close to Father's trembling body when he needed me.
"Justa," he whispered to me one night when I was seated next to his bed and holding his hand, "you are my last loyal soldier."
He must have thought I was asleep, and did not later mention to me he had said anything so tender.
A priest of the Lady of Flowers or Sophia sect, a man whom Father had known when both men were young troopers in the East, came to visit Father at the house in his time of sickness. The old soldier sat with Father and fanned him while he told him of how the goddess, who was partly the ancient Great Mother and partly the Virgin Mary and partly a nature goddess, would restore the health of those suffering in this world, if only they believed in her. In his anguished state of mind Father could not resist any kindness offered to him, and there was something in that gentlest and silliest of the new religions that promised hope to our hopeless general. Before any of us in the household were aware of a transformation in the old soldier, Father had become a devoted follower of the new cult. He took the razor from Medus's kit and with his own hands shaved the crown of his head to make the round tonsure that is the distinctive mark of Sophia's priests. To perform the sect's daily rites Father would rise from his bed clad in a long white linen robe and take up the cithara and the rattle to play his part in the slow shuffles and equally slow dances that somehow please the composite goddess. The formerly all-business soldier moved through the rituals chanting in unison with his old friend: "0 Sophia, goddess of the green reed, sister and wife of the universe, mother of us all, restore me as you restored him." He made a ridiculous sight chanting and swaying in his long white gown. I as well appreciated that performing such nonsense got him from his bed and back among the living. The religion promised a rebirth in a new life after the body perished. Father chose to continue living on the chance he might see that new life someday, even if he had to spend his present one dwelling beneath the threat of imminent death.
There were prices to be paid for the improvements in Father's condition. We never again ate meat at family meals, as Sophia is said to want her followers to eat only fruits and vegetables. Besides that, no one in Father's household could use foul language, not even if we stubbed a toe or accidentally bit our tongues while eating. We had to maintain a calm, inoffensive demeanor, lest we offend the goddess' chaste sensibilities. As for strong drink, a part of dinner Father had formerly greatly favored, we could still use wine and beer to honor Sophia in certain rites or when the water was bad-as it thankfully was in many parts of the world-but otherwise Sophia and Father insisted we shun anything that could induce intoxication, for while under the spell of Bacchus one might forget Sophia's kindly laws. The most disconcerting change for me was Father's insistence that we in his household participate in the same ceremonies he did. To my maid Helen the Lady of the Flowers was another god in a world that offered many, many deities; she performed the rituals gladly. Her husband Medus did as the master and his wife wanted, but I would get the giggles when I had to put on my diaphanous ceremonial robes and shuffle behind Father chanting, "0 Sophia, you have put together all the world has rendered asunder. Put together my heart."
"You will never see paradise if you keep doing that, Justa," Father would warn me when I laughed during the holy ceremonies.
He did not become angry with me, for anger was another emotion that disturbed the goddess.
"I am very sorr
y, sir," I would tell him. "You see, every time I walk in front of the sacred lanterns in this obscene outfit, I look as naked as a streetwalker. Your fellow worshipers can see all of me."
"There are only chaste eyes at our ceremonies," he told me. "You should not be presumptuous. The educated need paradise as much as anyone."
"I will do better, sir," I promised him, and I would bite my lips together to keep from laughing again. I still felt uncomfortable because I could tell the other old men in Father's rites looked upon me while entertaining thoughts that surely would have put a whole legion of chaste goddesses out of sorts.
Father prayed to the East, the direction from which true wisdom is supposed to come, each morning and evening while he was in the capital. His pleas and his devotion to the distant Sophia seemed to do us some good. The emperor forgot Father was in Garden City, and for many months he left us undisturbed.
hirteen days after Mr. Golden's first letter came to us on Mars a second group of his messengers carried another letter from their loquacious master into our camp inside the mining tunnels. This missive informed Father that Abdul Selin had indeed declared himself emperor of all Pan-Polaria and that the Army of North America had gone over to him. Mr. Golden wrote:
"`Unfortunately, Selin will reach Garden City and the military fleets at San Diego and Tampico and thence cross to Western Europe and collect the forces there before you can take action; that is, I mean to say, my beloved General Black, before we can take action. There is much to behold in the capital, where the remaining members of the emperor's City Guardsmen are slipping away in the night to join Selin's forces in the north. The cowardly pretender John Chrysalis goes from door to door in the palace seeking anyone who might stand with him. He is still trying to buy supporters at this late hour. They say he has offered money to those senators having contacts within the army. Everyone has refused to have anything to do with him; even after Chrysalis murdered two prominent men to terrify the city's populace, the people have refused to acknowledge his rule. We in the city will have a merry spectacle when that brute Selin gets his paws upon this dainty one. Thank the gods that you, my true emperor, are safe on another planet. Now you can fly swiftly to the Middle East, your old arena of operations, so you can there gather your forces to oppose Selin after he has disposed of Chrysalis.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 8
