"He is as big as a room!" he exclaimed to Father. "Are there more in Britain like him?"
"To tell the whole story, my lord," said Father, "the beast comes from Alabama. However, speaking of Britain, my lord, these men I brought with me come from the unit that, as you know, I was sent ... How should I put this? They are, so to speak, from Britain. That is to say, they are from the relevant portion of the island of Britain, that part you sent me to, you know, see about, my lord."
"Yes, yes, yes," said the emperor, waving away the topic. "Let's get to the point: where in Alabama did it come from?"
"In Alabama, my emperor?" asked Father, who had presumed the emperor might want to discuss the British rebellion.
"Where exactly did you get this wonderful boar?" demanded Luke Anthony.
"North of Gadsden, my lord," said Father. "A farmer caught it in a pit up in the mountains."
"A thousand men to the woods north of Gadsden," Luke commanded his chamberlain. "The beast may have a mate!"
"The situation in Britain, my lord-," began Father.
"I will deal with that, Black," said the emperor. "You can go. Those people you brought with you can go too," he added, referring to Medus and myself. "Aren't you supposed to be in Asia somewhere?"
"In Turkey, at Van City, my lord," said Father. "I command the Scythia Divisions and-"
"Boring, boring, boring," said Luke Anthony, and covered his ears. "Go back there. Well done, however. Well done indeed. I'll have to give you a title or something. Now, please clear the room. I have an exhibition to plan."
His chief concubine, Marcie Angelica, acted as a sort of household manager in the palace. It was she who held out her palms to show us she was pushing us from the opulent room that had seascape holograms projected on its walls and the interior of a saltwater aquarium on its ceiling. This was the one time in my life I was able to see her at close range. I could discern at that distance she was not as beautiful as I had thought she was in the arena. She did have ivory white teeth and hair that glowed as if it were somehow polished. I was put off to find Marcie's face was all sharp angles; there was nothing round or soft in her features, despite the layer of powder she put upon herself each morning. She hissed at us in Syntalk to move. That and her peculiar masculine build sufficed to hasten us from Luke Anthony's vicinity.
After six months of deep thought the emperor did finally get around to dealing with the five hundred mutineers from Britain camped on his doorstep. He told the group he would see they were paid, eventually. Then he told them to start walking back, and perhaps they should think of getting a ship when they came to the ocean. Since someone had to be blamed for what had happened or else people would blame him, Luke Anthony decided the onus should fall upon Mr. Perlman, the City Guardsmen's commander. I do not know enough of this Mr. Perlman to judge his soul. My rule is that in Garden City one should always believe the worst one hears about others. Jerome Perlman stole money and murdered innocent people, much as everyone else in government did. Had he not murdered and stolen he would have perished long before he did. History, that perennial liar, states that the delegation from Britain demanded the unfortunate man's death. I was in the city at the time; I can tell they were in no position to demand anything of Luke Anthony. The emperor alone decided his former friend's unhappy fate. He had heard through his informers that in a drunken moment Mr. Perlman had once spoken of overthrowing the emperor and installing his own son on the throne. The fool should never have been in his cups among other City Guardsmen; being their leader, he should have known the ranks of his men were full of secret agents who traded loose words for gold. The emperor gave Mr. Perlman to the Guardsmen he had led for nearly five years, and the men bade farewell to their former commander by taking him into the streets and tearing him to pieces the way hunting dogs tear apart a hare. The hour after that task was completed, the emperor sent another group of soldiers to call upon Mr. Perlman's son, whom they found hiding beneath a bush in the family garden before they sent him to that place wherein each of us may rightfully dream of greater glories.
The emperor declared a triumphal parade for himself in the city and would have added the title "the Conqueror of Britain" to his list of honorary names, as he credited himself for defeating the rebellion. Someone in the palace reminded him he had already taken that name the year before when the late Mr. Perlman crushed the previous mutiny. (He would add "Conqueror of Germany" and "Slayer of the Spaniards" for similar slaughters of his own unpaid soldiers before he was through.) To atone for the lack of a new title, he held some games in honor of himself. In the grand finale of the same he killed the giant boar we had brought him. Luke Anthony set the proper scene inside the Field of Diversions for the final denouement: a forest of pine trees was imported from the Rocky Mountains to be posted around the legendary beast, and he engaged a famous actor to recite a poem upon Hercules and the Erymanthian boar while Luke himself stole on tiptoes through the artificial forest armed with an elephant gun on his way to slay the creature. To add some drama to the already overheated scene, a maiden (actually, she was an actress and like all actresses was far from being a maiden) stood before the boar and screamed for some hero to rescue her. No one in the stands seemed to mind that she was not in the original story; this was art, and art cannot lie as long as it remains true to its intentions. Besides, almost none in the crowd had read the original story. Many present could not hear the poet's words recited over the actress's yelps, and most of them were thankful for her strong lungs. The theoretically ferocious boar was staked to the ground and was calmly chewing on some turnips from its trough while the epic story unfolded around it. When the actor exclaimed, "Then the haughty earthbound son of Zeus did let his death bolt cut through the hushed air," Luke Anthony shot the pig in the heart. The beast gave a surprised grunt, rolled over on its hairy side, and expired with a final turnip protruding from its mouth. The famous actor could not complete the recitation of his poem for the thunderous and sustained applause that followed the animal's demise.
After the performance the emperor named a new man to perform the necessary administrative chores Mr. Perlman had once done. He chose for this position a former chicken farmer of unknown descent who bore a Greek last name, a small dark man almost as handsome as the emperor himself, but one possessing a slight build and a sharply defined nose and chin, in contrast to the emperor's features, which were as wide as the muscles on his arms. This new chamberlain was the soon-to-be famous Otto Cleander, who soon proved himself to be more cunning than Sao Trentex and more vicious than Mr. Perlman, and who would one day rival the emperor in power. The people did not perceive any danger in Mr. Cleander on the bright day of his appointment; they saw in him only a reserved, cautious public servant, one favoring the shadow mechanisms of imperial government over the sunlight of public acclaim, for from the beginning Cleander moved upon his victims as unobtrusively as a viper does upon mice, and few realized how deadly he was before the moment he had his fangs in them.
Father and his household were on a steamship bound for Istanbul when the boar fell and Cleander rose. On that day we were overjoyed to think that every passing minute put more of the placid, blue-green sea between us and Garden City. Our home in eastern Turkey lay ahead of us. There we would again find Van City's square walls and Father's little garden behind the military station's only three-story house, and we had no intention of ever sailing back into the capital's troubled waters.
y May it was clear we had to leave Mars for our old home base in Turkey, where the soldiers of Father's former command had also declared for him. Mr. Golden's couriers had brought the nanomachines we call the new metal plague with them from Earth, and already the mining station's computers were failing to produce naught but display screens of scrolling numbers. The last two members of Father's command who had implants within their systems had likewise perished. We had to evacuate soon, or else we would be trapped on an alien planet while we waited for our atmospheric systems to fail.
W
e loaded the entire 1,628 members of the mining station onto the gigantic ore ferry that normally carried rock from Mars orbit to orbit about the Earth. By using the barge's shuttle, we filled up its empty hold, 150 passengers at a time. Despite the cramped quarters we had, our veteran pilot, Captain Mbasa, expertly pulled the vessel from its path around the Red Planet and went directly into the solar wind, wherein the barge's expanding wings and nose scope could collect radiated energy to power our nuclear generators and bring us home. In only fifteen days' time, Mbasa hit the retro-rockets to slow us down enough to flip us around the Earth and put us into orbit. In reverse of the process we had used on Mars, the shuttle craft carried 150 of us at a time to Van City, or so it did for almost ten round-trips.
We soon discovered the surface of the Earth was rife with the nanomachines. The shuttle carried millions of them onto the ore barge, and within two days they caused our oxygen system to fail. Those of us left in the hold had to put on the individual respiratory tanks the miners had used and hope that the ninety minutes of breathing the tanks allowed would give us enough time to reach solid ground. The shuttle craft exploded on its tenth return trip back to the barge, leaving Father, myself, our four servants, and one hundred and twenty-two others stranded 630 miles above ground.
We would have perished like live sardines packed inside a large can if brave Captain Mbasa had not hit the retro-rockets one last time and sent the barge into the Earth's atmosphere, where the ungainly ship was not designed to fly and naturally began falling like a stone. While the captain manually held the craft on a nearly steady course, the rest of us rushed to the escape pods and ejected into free fall in the upper stratosphere. When the parachutes on the eight pods opened, we softly landed in a scattered pattern across eastern Turkey, and the soldiers from Van City had to spend the next week gathering everyone who had escaped the ore barge. We were safe, though Father had been shaken by the experience after already having been weakened by our time in Mars's reduced gravity. Ours, however, was a better fate than that of courageous Captain Mbasa, who rode the ore barge until it exploded like a supernova in the cloudless sky and was strewn across the mountains of southwestern Asia. To my knowledge, ours was the last flight to escape the other planets. For a month afterward the two radios we had at Van City that still functioned received desperate messages from those left behind on the mining stations and scientific posts in the Asteroid Belt and on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter where the nanomachines had also reached; soon the messages ceased, and there was again only icy silence in the expanses of the solar system above us.
By early summer we had learned from travelers that what Mr. Golden had foretold had come to pass: Abdul Selin and his Army of the Heartland had reached Garden City, and in a single day had disposed of the pretender John Chrysalis. A letter from Mr. Golden informed us that as Selin's advance guard approached the city, Chrysalis had made numerous desperate appeals to the Senate. He had proposed restoring the ancient rights the senatorial class had enjoyed in republican times, provided the current senators supported him against Selin. Chrysalis had requested that representatives of all the city's religions go to meet Selin's troops on the march and tell them John Chrysalis was willing to share his rule with their commander. When the army reached the capital's suburbs, the Senate and the City Guardsmen, both of whom had served the pretender when Selin was far away on the Great Plains and Chrysalis's money was nearby, at once turned on their master. John Chrysalis's last day on Earth found him running through the hundreds of rooms within the palace, calling out to servants who had disappeared and peering out the high arched windows for Guardsmen who had taken off their uniforms and blended into the civilian population. The last soldier on watch intercepted the frantic man in a hallway and stabbed him to death, so that his body might be presented as a welcoming gift to Selin when that terrible little man at last entered the capital city proper.
The death of one rival did not appease the general of the Army of the Heartland. He did not pause a few days to hold a parade for himself. He went right to the business of establishing total rule. Selin at once dismissed the Senate and mixed the present City Guardsmen into the regular army and made new Guardsmen from the ranks of his own force. Many noble families-including those who had the surnames of Chrysalis, Whiteman, and Black-disappeared or went into exile. Father's wife and his two legitimate sons became prisoners in their homes. The other members of father's extended family were put to death. As Mr. Golden had predicted, Selin quickly seized the fleets stationed at San Diego and Tampico. From the latter of those two ports he sent troops to North Africa to take control of the solitary division stationed in Egypt. Thus his two remaining rivals were left isolated in distant parts of the world: Whiteman was walled inside Britain and Scandinavia, and Father was trapped in Turkey.
Mr. Golden's letter assured Father we still had support among the common folk in Garden City.
"Every day they call out your name to Selin and his thugs when they march through the streets," he wrote. "The African turns a darker shade of black when he hears their taunts. He has murdered thousands for your sake; still he cannot stop the people from loving you."
"Golden is betting on every spot on the dice," commented Father as I read the letter to him. "He fears there may yet be a popular uprising on my behalf. I wonder what he is saying to Selin."
As I read on, we learned that Selin had sent a large army across the Mediterranean in the direction of Istanbul.
"We will have to meet him there," said Father. "He'll be most vulnerable while he's making the crossing. Once he gets into Asia, his larger army will overwhelm ours. We have to defeat him at the Bosporus ... or we won't."
My father was weak that summer day. None of us in his household dared to say aloud that knowing what Selin had done to his cousins, nephews, and nieces was the affliction that was bringing him low. We did not wish to distress him further. Father's pulse beat too fast when he awoke. He had to remain in his bed until it slowed and his head did not spin when he stood upright. When he finally got his feet under himself, he could not move quickly. All of us-including nonbelievers like myself-prayed to Sophia to aid him in the long struggle he had before him. In the evening, I, the skeptic, took his place in the cult's ritual processions while Father watched from his couch, as the exertion of the long, slow shuffles the deity requires would have undone him. He promised the officers who came to visit our house he would feel stronger soon. He assured everyone that when that time came we would start marching to the west to defend Istanbul.
ny discussion of a possible marriage in my future ended after our first trip to Garden City. I became confidante and chief advisor to Father-not that he ever would have given me any title-and I would remain so for the rest of his days. Father wanted me always at his side, to read him his correspondence, to manage what money we had, to give my opinions on his plans, or simply to rub his tired legs when there was no one else to do so. I knew he wanted me near him more than he wanted to see me wed. There were so few others to whom Father could reveal his thoughts, and after that horrible day in the emperor's antechamber, Father believed Luke Anthony's agents were constantly watching him, and they undoubtedly were.
For my part, I was wary of becoming anyone's wife. The soldiers my father led dwelt in constant want, received little pay, and knew the everpresent threat of sudden death. In our time of diminishing expectations their wives suffered the same existence and did not have any of the honors soldiers can win in battle. In Garden City I had seen the privileged wives of the upper classes; those women knew no hardships, and they cared for their husbands less than the poor soldiers' wives in Turkey did for theirs. Marriage in Garden City provided entrance into the highest tiers of society and gave license to a noblewoman to sleep with whomever she pleased. Joy, companionship, and love were not parts of the institution the noblewomen knew. My old teacher Mathias the Glistening had the romantic notion that marriage was the reunion of two incomplete souls that had been split in twain at birth int
o one perfect spirit. There had been, according to Mathias, some manner of perfect union in the mind of God before the parted souls were dispatched into the world. I wanted with my entire heart to believe as he did. Mathias, like my father, was a good man in spite of the horrible things both men did, and above all else I wanted to imitate the good. It was my misfortune to be born into a world wherein the divine powers Mathias had spoken of had sent forth men and women possessing less than half a soul or no soul at all. Most Pan-Polaric citizens living away from the frontiers tried union after union and found each one they formed to be incomplete, regardless of how many times they attempted to put things together. Wise Mathias himself had married Gloriana, the evil woman responsible for shaping young Luke Anthony. My father never said so, but I knew he had become increasingly distant from his legitimate wife and did not regret his separation from her, as she was a woman of patrician birth and had patrician tastes and had come to look upon my father as a rustic buffoon armed with a rifle rather than the usual tractor. I additionally knew his affair with my mother had meant nothing to either him or her beyond the physical pleasure it had given them.
Despite knowing the romantic dangers of my times, I too had once been in love. When I was nineteen I had secretly given my heart to a young merchant working in Van City. My darling had gentle eyes and sold scrap metal to the army, which our engineers used to reload spent ammunition cartridges; his was a humble calling but an honest one and therefore a superior one to most I had seen being followed in the capital. Twice a week he came to the base and set up a stall at the main gate alongside the other local traders. I found an excuse to walk past his place of business several times a day whenever he was there, and took care to turn this way and that so he might look fully upon me in my long, linen dresses that only the female members of a superior officer's family can wear. I spoke to him only of the quality of his goods and of the weather and of how the crops were prospering in that part of the Empire thanks to genetically altered fungus that had replenished Anatolia's soil after 2192. When I pretended to look away from him, I saw his eyes always followed me for as long as I was visible to him.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 11
