When a prominent family in the neighborhood came over to visit-and one of them came nearly every day-Father found it easier to spend his hours of inaction in the small garden out back or by taking long walks to the city's bustling street markets. While he strolled through neighborhoods that were completely changed from his younger days, Father felt like a stranger in the city he had known briefly in his youth. He did not recognize the songs the street minstrels sang in the public places; the new tunes were filthy ditties in Spanish about the emperor's physical condition or about his harem of odd young men and not the old military ballads Father remembered.
There were theaters everywhere in the city, many more than when he had been a young man and people still had hologram sets and other electronic equipment. When he went inside some of these new establishments, he discovered that the actors he saw did not perform the old plays written in English and instead did outlandish deeds on stage such as mutilating themselves with daggers to please the drunken, sullen audiences; nor did Father understand why so many actors impersonated women and in front of hundreds of spectators did things with other men that would have earned them a trip to the mines had they done them in public thirty years before.
Every day on the streets there was some sort of native holiday; there were always long processions and the din of trumpets and drums. No one, however, could explain to Father what was being celebrated. Every city block seemed to contain a brothel that had blonde women hanging from its open windows. Every alley held naked beggars crouching in the winter cold as they pled for money or drugs. Father could not speak to many people on the streets in English (neither in the real sort nor in that of the army camps) or in Syntalk or even in the Spanish still common in the rest of Mexico; much of Garden City spoke either an obscure tongue from a faraway land, or they used a patois composed of dozens of different languages, only snatches of which could he comprehended. Father could no more have had a conversation with one of these citizens than he could with the sparrows feeding on the filth in the open sewers. The friends of Father's childhood were either long since dead or hiding from the modern world in remote country estates and hoping to die of old age before anyone discovered where they were or the new diseases or gangs got to them.
Father was only comfortable in Garden City whenever he came to visit Helen and me in our rented lodgings; while with us he could play dominoes against his servant Medus or listen as I read from Dickens and Jane Austen. I upbraided him during these frequent visits for rambling about the city unprotected. At that time groups of armed hoodlums were rampant in the often unpatrolled streets; these young thugs wore short hooded robes to hide themselves and had long knives they carried in their belts; everyone in our tenement building said these hooded youths ambushed their individual victims in swarms the way a pack of wolves falls upon a single deer and that a solitary person had no defense against them.
"Who would attack me?" was Father's response to my warnings. "Do I look like I have money?" he would ask.
"Sir, there are groups of wealthy youths who kill for the pleasure of killing. They think it a kind of sport. Money means nothing to them," I told him. "They care nothing of how you look."
Helen agreed with me. She told a gory story of a baker murdered in a street neighboring our flat to illustrate she knew what she was talking about.
"An old wives' tale," huffed Father. "People could not be so cruel ... people who aren't emperor, I mean. I know the Pan-Polarians better than you provincial folk. I know they do not do such things."
"You haven't lived among them for forty-six years, sir," I told him. "The only Pan-Polarians you know are professional soldiers, and they only call themselves that."
"Aren't they citizens?" demanded Father.
"Some of them are," I allowed.
"Aren't my soldiers the same as these chaps loitering about here in Garden City?" he asked. "I admit there's not much order here. That's because no one has taken charge of the situation. Told them what they should be about. People are the same everywhere you go. I blame the city's leadership. Teach these people how to behave and some useful machine skills, and this town would whip itself into shape quite nicely."
I sighed at his ignorance. Both Medus and Helen did likewise; which was impudent of them, seeing as how they were hired servants, no matter how familiar they were to us. Happily, Father remained as unperceptive as he usually was and was not offended by anything they did.
"So you say, sir," I said. "You still should have a guard when you go walking."
He said the day he took orders from women would be the last day he walked anywhere. He continued to rove around the dangerous city as freely as a cloud scudding across a summer sky. The thieves he passed on the streets must have thought him a lunatic to roam about the disintegrating buildings looking like a character from an antique farce. His clothes were from some other historical era; his ragged hair, his odd speech, his sunburnt visage all declared him to be a penniless bumpkin in town to attend a festival or to beg alms. Garden City's legions of criminals consequently left him alone and sought victims elsewhere.
When Father was next summoned to the palace, the emperor was up and active, too active and much too furious to spare a word on General Black. Marcie had overseen yet another bloodletting upon several noble families. These executions of imaginary criminals had further convinced the emperor plotters were everywhere among the powerful. At the time Father arrived the emperor was abusing the ears of some goons among the City Guardsmen and some senior officers from the regular army who had let someone escape his mistress's clutches; even now, the emperor was shouting, even now this escapee was making plans to assassinate him. Father sat in the same antechamber he had sat in eleven years earlier when he had witnessed the murders of two innocent men and was splattered with their guiltless blood. This time a butler brought Father some food and drink while he listened to the muffled sounds filtering through the tall iron doors protecting the palace's interior. Most of the other provincial generals were inside those doors and enduring the full blast of the emperor's insane harangue. Some of them had been virtual prisoners in the palace since the time of Cleander's death. The Concerned One would have killed these long-term "guests" of his for conspiring against him while they were on the frontiers, except that he feared their replacements would be no more trustworthy. He figured the current generals were at least of a known quality, as imperial agents had spied upon them for years. The emperor told his captive generals each day he was a god-or at least a god in the image of a man-and he abused the military men for never showing him adequate reverence due a genuine deity. Some of them, the Concerned One observed, were slow to prostrate themselves to him. Only a few of them had memorized his honorific names. "Did you think I, a god, wouldn't notice?" Father heard him scream through the iron doors. Abdul Selin was among those the emperor made a special effort to browbeat. The smuggling and extortion rackets the enormous Selin clan had long practiced in their Tunisian homeland looked to an outsider like the emperor to be proof of a conspiracy of some sort; that the Selins were also members of an odd and highly secretive sun cult testified to some sort of sinister plot, or so it did in the emperor's opinion. As a criminal syndicate, a vast extended family, and a unique religious order, the Selins shielded themselves with triple layers of protection from any imperial agents attempting to penetrate their numbers. The Concerned One hated this pack of hairy little men infiltrating his military and civil administration. He feared them with an equal ardor, for the Selins were an enigma to him, as they were to everyone else within the Empire. For what he knew of them, killing one of their members, particularly a powerful member such as General Abdul Selin, might bring retaliation. Paralyzed by his fears, the emperor had to settle for bombarding the Selin clan with threats, hoping that might make them as frightened of him as he already was of them. I did not witness any of the sessions the emperor had with his generals. Drawing from what I had seen of him, I could imagine how a man of Abdul Selin's temperament took t
he hard words the mad emperor threw in his direction. Selin would not forget these constant dressing-downs, nor would he be one to forget that Father did not have to endure the humiliations visited upon him and the other commanders. That day at the palace would certainly not be one he would set aside in his mind after he met Father in the antechamber minutes after the emperor had yelled himself hoarse and had retired for the evening.
"So, Black," said Selin, bursting into the room and showing his very white teeth through the black tangle of his beard, "I see the emperor's favorite is allowed to sit out here and nibble cheese like a pet mouse while he screams at the rest of us!"
"I am hardly his favorite, sir," said Father, and brushed the crumbs off his face.
"Do you know what his oversized bitch called me today?" asked Selin, referring to Marcie. "That whore! The Concerned One, or whatever he calls himself these days, he lets the slut call me a hairy monkey!" (His small body tightened like a rope pulling a heavy weight when he thought of her.) "She put a collar on General Lamb and made him bark like a dog! `Bark!' she says, and he did! She tries to put a collar on me, and I will snap her neck!"
Selin ripped a handful of wiry hair from his own beard to demonstrate his rage. Blood swelled from his face and down his chin, yet his glistening teeth remained fixed. Two of his family cronies, easily identified by the large sun-face decals they bore upon their military tunics, had followed Selin into the small room from the interior rooms; they quickly retreated behind the molded doors when they witnessed the mood of their clan leader.
"You really should control your anger, sir," said Father. "Look what you've done to your face. What must you be doing to your internal organs? My doctor tells me anger can cause ulcers and-"
Father did not continue because Selin had let go a shriek so terrible it made Father's ears buzz for several moments after the other man was again silent.
"You will know everything about my anger, someday!" Selin swore to him. "One day I will tear your heart out and eat it like I would an apple! First, I will roast you unto death over a campfire! I will stretch you on a wheel and peel your hide off! I will stick a glowing poker down your throat and make your lungs pop! You will beg me to bring the fatal blow!"
"Why do you say such things to me?" asked Father. "I am an old man. I saved your army for you."
"You ... you ... you ancient simpleton!" groaned Selin, and had to hold his hands over his abdomen, for an unnameable something had erupted inside him with such force his guts ached. "Someday I will teach you a final lesson!" he hissed at Father; then he hurried from the room to vent his fury on his hapless relatives, two of whom he would beat to death before the morning.
Because the Concerned One already had absolute power and the inclination to execute anyone at any moment, Father decided he had greater worries than what Selin was promising to do at some indefinite point in the future. Father reasoned the emperor was still very young and would be ruling long after he and Selin had gone to their separate versions of paradise. Everyone of importance had told Father that if the emperor died in the immediate future his successor would be either Fabian Clement or Patrick Herman Pretext, the leading lights in the Senate; the former was the greatest orator of the day, and the latter was a very old man everyone esteemed-using the low standards of our time-as an extremely distinguished man simply because he was so very old. Father thought the upper classes and the City Guardsmen would never support a provincial strongman of Selin's ilk. General Emile Lamb, the fellow Selin had seen bark like a dog, commanded the City Guardsmen at that juncture. Unlike his predecessors in that post, Lamb had little power and functioned under the close scrutiny of the emperor's spies. Everyone agreed he was a nobody. The other important office in the emperor's court, that of chamberlain, belonged to Able Einman, another weak functionary the emperor's men (and Marcie's) kept tied to a short rope. Thus there was no one in a position to challenge the Concerned One's rule, and should the son of Mathias eventually regain a portion of his long-absent sanity, Father believed Selin's animosity toward him could bring no one any harm, for power would long lie somewhere other than in the little Turk's hands.
Father did not know General Lamb was an associate of Selin's and like Selin a worshiper of Helios; they had attended the same private school when they were boys and had made a blood pact when they were young men at home in Tunis to help each other rise in the world when they were older. Lamb was obligated to do little while he was under the Concerned One's thumb in the capital. He was there fully employed in the job of keeping his head atop his shoulders. He nonetheless did somehow convince the emperor one night when the Concerned One was more intoxicated than usual to sign an order sending Selin back to the Great Plains. Selin there would be free from the emperor's outbursts and in control of the Empire's largest army. The little Turkish gangster slipped from Garden City in the middle of an otherwise uneventful night, the emperor's orders in hand. He flew north on the Pan American Highway in the company of ten thousand of his relatives, certain he would outlive the troubles to come and equally certain many of the men he left behind in the capital would not. If history were not a dunderhead, she would record Selin began his assent to absolute power that night he extracted himself from the fiasco that was taking place in Garden City and fled to his troops in the grasslands of the windy American plains.
When the spring of the emperor Luke Anthony's last year on Earth came slithering into the Mexican high country, the emperor/god decided the time had arrived for a grand ceremony involving the entire population to mark the refounding of Garden City as the Mausoleum of the Concerned One. He announced he would plow a furrow in the earth around the entire circumference of the capital to replant symbolically the city the Aztecs had founded but failed to name after the son of Mathias the Glistening. All of the leading citizens, including Father, and some three hundred thousand less prestigious folk, came to a cornfield beyond the southern suburbs to cheer on the divine sower of cities in this great endeavor. The Concerned One arrived in his Hercules outfit and riding atop a golden chariot. He gave an impromptu oration to the assembled, explaining that he had dealt with oxen before: he had captured the herds of Geryon and the Cretan bull when he was working for the late King Eurystheus. The crowd was very polite to him; only a few small boys snickered at the mad emperor's retelling of mythological tales from another civilization, and those impudent little imps were buried deep in the massive throng, in places the City Guardsmen could not single them out. The Concerned One posed behind his animal-driven plow for a team of photographers and artists while the latter drew sketches for a commemorative coin. Thirty minutes later, after a shout of encouragement from his City Guardsmen, the emperor cracked his whip over the broad backs of what must have been the fattest oxen in Mexico, and the plow inched forward. An hour into the wonderful task, the emperor/god and his entourage realized something they should have known before they began: plowing a furrow around a city containing twenty million residents was not a job to be accomplished in a single afternoon, and perhaps not in several weeks of sunny afternoons. (Imagine, some of the Guardsmen said, what the job would have been like a few years before, when there were forty million people in the city.) Furthermore, there were tree roots, hedges, roads, rivers, walls, and elevated aqueducts in the emperor's path, and none of these objects were as impressed with the Concerned One's divinity as he was. By the time the midday sun became the evening sunset, the emperor had not progressed far enough to be out of sight of his starting point. He kept running into a new obstacle every few steps and was repeatedly cursing his beleaguered City Guardsmen, who had to chop away at whatever was in the plow's path. The capital's leading men meanwhile grew red in the bright sunlight. Their wives fanned themselves and complained of the heat. My weary father had seen men plow before; he did not care to see another one, so he sat himself beneath an oak tree, and in its comfortable shade took a nap that lasted until after dark. The emperor by then was longing for his dinner more than for completing his monumental
chore.
"Now that I have begun this menial job," he told the anxious, hungry crowd, "let us return to the affairs of state. These sturdy beasts"-he meant the fat, indolent oxen-"will, by my command, complete the circuit around the city on their own. Should they defy my wishes, let the world know I will return to destroy them!"
He and nearly everyone else went home to eat, leaving behind a detachment of City Guardsmen to continue plowing the endless furrow. The instant they were alone, the soldiers hit upon the ingenious idea of taking the plow out of the ground and dragging it along the surface of the earth so the steel triangle would meet much less resistance. Even under these new conditions, the soldiers still needed ten long days to drag the plow all the way around the city. Their completed furrow was a mere scratch across the topsoil, which, when one considers the fate of Mausoleum of the Concerned One, was a more fitting tribute to the new city than the City Guardsmen could have ever anticipated.
The emperor/god financed some additional athletic exhibitions to celebrate the great renaming of the city. To pay for these new shows the Concerned One committed a host of fresh murders and confiscated the property of his wealthy victims. In one nighttime purge he killed most of the living ex-speakers of the Senate, the Pedros brothers, Marcello and Samsung from the speculators' guild, and the reigning governor and tribune for the people in California. While he was at it, he executed his nephew Albert Anthony and his father's cousin Anne Kelbertson. These last two victims had been friends to the emperor's concubine Marcie, if a cold hearted killer like Marcie Angelica could be said to have friends. That the Concerned One would kill members of his own family awoke a terrible new fear in the make-believe queen of the Amazons. The commander of the City Guardsmen, General Lamb, and the chamberlain Einman were quick to impress upon her the notion that anyone, absolutely anyone, could be the next to die. Einman attempted to sway her because he was as terrified of the mad emperor as everyone else was. Lamb, as I have said, was Abdul Selin's man in the imperial court and was eager to undermine the emperor any way he could. The Concerned One increased Marcie's anxiety when he put to death four members of his harem on the preposterous charge of having had sexual relations with the late Cleander, when everyone knew Cleander never had been affectionate with anyone; all four of these women had been close friends of the chief concubine before she rose in the world. The day following their executions the emperor killed every one of his long-time athlete comrades (save for Norman) because he said they had touched his godly body during wrestling matches and thus were no longer fit to live among the mortals.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 23
