Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  I had never much liked the Tip. It had always seemed to me a haunted place. And of course it was haunted: that was its purpose, to house the revenants of the past, ghosts of the False Tribulation startled out of their century-long slumber. Here was evidence of the best and worst of the people who had inhabited the Years of Vice and Profligacy. Their fine things were very fine, their glassware especially, and it was a straitened aristo indeed who did not possess antique table-settings rescued from some ruin or other. Sometimes one might find silver utensils in boxes, or useful tools, or coins. The coins were too plentiful to be worth much, individually, but they could be worked into buttons or other adornments. One of the high-born back at the Estate owned a saddle studded with copper pennies all from the year 2032. (I had occasionally been enlisted to polish it.)

  But here also was the trash and inexplicable detritus: “plastic,” gone brittle with sunlight or soft with the juices of the earth; bits of metal blooming with rust; electronic devices blackened by time and imbued with the sad inutility of a tensionless spring; engine parts, corroded; copper wire rotten with verdigris; aluminum cans and steel barrels eaten through by the poisonous fluids they had once contained—and so on, almost ad infinitum.

  Here, too, were the in-between things, the curiosities, the ugly or pretty baubles, as intriguing and as useless as seashells. (“Put down that rusty trumpet, Adam, you’ll cut your lip and poison your blood!”—my mother, when we had gone to the Tip many years before I met Julian. There had been no music in the trumpet anyway; its bell was bent and corroded through.)

  More than that, though, there was the uneasy knowledge that these things, fine or corrupt, had survived their makers—had proved more imperishable than flesh or spirit (for the souls of the secular ancients were almost certainly not first in line for the Resurrection).

  And yet, these books . . . they tempted; they proclaimed their seductions boldly. Some were decorated with impossibly beautiful women in various degrees of undress. I had already sacrificed my personal claim to virtue with certain young women at the Estate, whom I had recklessly kissed; at the age of seventeen I considered myself a jade, or something like one; but these images were so frank and impudent they made me blush and look away.

  Julian simply ignored them, as he had always been invulnerable to the charms of women. He preferred the larger and more densely written material—he had already set aside a textbook of Biology, spotted and discolored but largely intact. He found another volume almost as large, and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Adam, try this—you might find it enlightening.”

  I inspected it skeptically. The book was called The History of Mankind In Space.

  “The moon again,” I said.

  “Read it for yourself.”

  “Tissue of lies, I’m sure.”

  “With photographs.”

  “Photographs prove nothing. Those people could do anything with photographs.”

  “Well, read it anyway,” Julian said.

  In truth the idea excited me. We had had this argument many times, Julian and I, especially on autumn nights when the moon hung low and ponderous on the horizon. People have walked there, he would say. The first time he made this claim I laughed; the second time I said, “Yes, certainly: I once climbed there myself, on a greased rainbow—” But he had been serious.

  Oh, I had heard these stories before. Who hadn’t? Men on the moon. What surprised me was that someone as well-educated as Julian would believe them.

  “Just take the book,” he insisted.

  “What: to keep?”

  “Certainly to keep.”

  “Believe I will,” I muttered, and I stuck the object in my back-satchel and felt both proud and guilty. What would my father say, if he knew I was reading literature without a Dominion stamp? What would my mother make of it? (Of course I would not tell them.)

  At this point I backed off, and found a grassy patch a little away from the rubble, where I could sit and eat some of the lunch I had packed, and watch Julian, who continued to sort through the detritus with a kind of scholarly intensity. Sam Godwin came and joined me, brushing a spot on an old timber so he could recline without soiling his uniform, such as it was.

  “He sure loves those old books,” I said, making conversation.

  Sam was often taciturn—the very picture of an old veteran—but he nodded and spoke familiarly: “He’s learned to love them. I helped teach him. I wonder if that was wise. Maybe he loves them too much. It might be they’ll kill him, one of these days.”

  “How, Sam? By the apostasy of them?”

  “Julian’s too smart for his own good. He debates with the Dominion clergy. Just last week I found him arguing with Ben Kreel[2] about God, history, and such abstractions. Which is precisely what he must not do, if he wants to survive the next few years.”

  “Why, what threatens him?”

  “The jealousy of the powerful,” Sam said, but he would say no more on the subject, only sat and stroked his graying beard, and glanced occasionally, and uneasily, to the east.

  The day went on, and eventually Julian had to drag himself from his nest of books with only a pair of prizes: the Introduction To Biology and another volume called Geography of North America. Time to go, Sam insisted; better to be back at the Estate by supper; in any case, riders had been sent ahead, and the official pickers and Dominion curators would soon be here to cull what we had left.

  But I have said that Julian tutored me in one of his apostasies. Here is how it happened. We stopped, at the drowsy end of the afternoon, at the height of a ridge overlooking the town of Williams Ford, the grand Estate upstream of it, and the River Pine as it cut through the valley on its way from the mountains of the West. From this vantage we could see the steeple of the Dominion Hall, and the revolving wheels of the grist mill and the lumber mill, and so on, blue in the long light and hazy with woodsmoke, colored here and there with what remained of the autumn foliage. Far to the south a railway bridge crossed the gorge of the Pine like a suspended thread. Go inside, the weather seemed to proclaim; it’s fair but it won’t be fair for long; bolt the window, stoke the fire, boil the apples; winter’s due. We rested our horses on the windy hilltop, and Julian found a blackberry bramble where the berries were still plump and dark, and we plucked some of these and ate them.

  This was the world I had been born into. It was an autumn like every autumn I could remember. But I could not help thinking of the Tip and its ghosts. Maybe those people, the people who had lived through the Efflorescence of Oil and the False Tribulation, had felt about their homes and neighborhoods as I felt about Williams Ford. They were ghosts to me, but they must have seemed real enough to themselves—must have been real; had not realized they were ghosts; and did that I mean I was also a ghost, a revenant to haunt some future generation?

  Julian saw my expression and asked me what was the matter. I told him my thoughts.

  “Now you’re thinking like a philosopher,” he said, grinning.

  “No wonder they’re such a miserable brigade, then.”

  “Unfair, Adam—you’ve never seen a philosopher in your life.” Julian believed in Philosophers and claimed to have met one or two.

  “Well, I imagine they’re miserable, if they go around thinking of themselves as ghosts and such.”

  “It’s the condition of all things,” Julian said. “This blackberry, for example.” He plucked one and held it in the pale palm of his hand. “Has it always looked like this?”

  “Obviously not,” I said, impatiently.

  “Once it was a tiny green bud of a thing, and before that it was part of the substance of the bramble, which before that was a seed inside a blackberry—”

  “And round and round for all eternity.”

  “But no, Adam, that’s the point. The bramble, and that tree over there, and the gourds in the field, and the crow circling over them—they’re all descended from ancestors that didn’t quite resemble them. A blackberry or a crow is a form, and forms ch
ange over time, the way clouds change shape as they travel across the sky.”

  “Forms of what?”

  “Of DNA,” Julian said earnestly. (The Biology he had picked out of the Tip was not the first Biology he had read.)

  “Julian,” Sam warned, “I once promised this boy’s parents you wouldn’t corrupt him.”

  I said, “I’ve heard of DNA. It’s the life force of the secular ancients. And it’s a myth.”

  “Like men walking on the moon?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And who’s your authority on this? Ben Kreel? The Dominion History of the Union?”

  “Nothing is changeless except DNA? That’s a peculiar argument even from you, Julian.”

  “It would be, if I were making it. But DNA isn’t changeless. It struggles to remember itself, but it never remembers itself perfectly. Remembering a fish, it imagines a lizard. Remembering a horse, it imagines a hippopotamus. Remembering an ape, it imagines a man.”

  “Julian!” Sam was insistent now. “That’s quite enough.”

  “You sound like a Darwinist,” I said.

  “Yes,” Julian admitted, smiling in spite of his unorthodoxy, the autumn sun turning his face the color of penny copper. “I suppose I do.”

  That night, I lay in bed until I was reasonably certain both my parents were asleep. Then I rose, lit a lamp, and took the new (or rather, very old) The History of Mankind In Space from where I had hidden it behind my oaken dresser.

  I leafed through the brittle pages. I didn’t read the book. I would read it, but tonight I was too weary to pay close attention, and in any case I wanted to savor the words (lies and fictions though they might be), not rush through them. Tonight I wanted only to sample the book; in other words, to look at the pictures.

  There were dozens of photographs, and each one captured my attention with fresh marvels and implausibilities. One of them showed—

  or purported to show—men standing on the surface of the moon, just as Julian had described.

  The men in the picture were evidently Americans. They wore flags stitched to the shoulders of their moon clothing, an archaic version of our own flag, with something less than the customary sixty stars. Their clothing was white and ridiculously bulky, like the winter clothes of the Inuit, and they wore helmets with golden visors that disguised their faces. I supposed it must be very cold on the moon, if explorers required such cumbersome protection. They must have arrived in winter. However, there was no ice or snow in the neighborhood. The moon seemed to be little more than a desert, dry as a stick and dusty as a Tipman’s wardrobe.

  I cannot say how long I stared at this picture, puzzling over it. It might have been an hour or more. Nor can I accurately describe how it made me feel . . . larger than myself, but lonely, as if I had grown as tall as the stars and lost sight of everything familiar. By the time I closed the book the moon had risen outside my window—the real moon, I mean; a harvest moon, fat and orange, half-hidden behind drifting, evolving clouds.

  I found myself wondering whether it was truly possible that men had visited that celestial body. Whether, as the pictures implied, they had ridden there on rockets, rockets a thousand times larger than the familiar Independence Day fireworks. But if men had visited the moon, why hadn’t they stayed there? Was it so inhospitable a place that no one wished to remain?

  Or perhaps they had stayed, and were living there still. If the moon was such a cold place, I reasoned, people residing on its surface would be forced to build fires to keep warm.

  There seemed to be no wood on the moon, judging by the photographs, so they must have resorted to coal or peat. I went to the window and examined the moon minutely for any sign of campfires, pit mining, or other lunar industry. But I could see none. It was only the moon, mottled and changeless. I blushed at my own gullibility, replaced the book in its hiding place, chased these heresies from my mind with a prayer (or a hasty facsimile of one), and eventually fell asleep.

  3

  It falls to me to explain something of Williams Ford, and my family’s place in it—and Julian’s—before I describe the threat Sam Godwin feared, which materialized in our village not long before Christmas.[3]

  Situated at the head of the valley was the font of our prosperity, the Duncan and Crowley Estate. It was a country estate (obviously, since we were in Athabaska, far from the eastern seats of power), owned by two influential New York mercantile families, who maintained their villa not only as a source of income but as a kind of resort, safely distant (several days’ journey by train) from the intrigues and pestilences of city life. It was inhabited—ruled, I might say—not only by the Duncan and Crowley patriarchs but by a whole legion of cousins, nephews, relations by marriage, high-born friends, and distinguished guests in search of clean air and rural views. Our corner of Athabaska was blessed with a benign climate and pleasant scenery, according to the season, and these things attract idle aristos the way strong butter attracts flies.

  It remains unrecorded whether the town existed before the Estate or vice versa; but certainly the town depended on the Estate for its prosperity. In Williams Ford there were essentially three classes: the Owners, or aristos; below them the leasing class, who worked as smiths, carpenters, coopers, overseers, gardeners, beekeepers, etc., and whose leases were repaid in service; and finally the indentured laborers, who worked as field hands, inhabited rude shacks along the west bank of the Pine, and received no compensation beyond bad food and worse lodging.

  My family occupied an ambivalent place in this hierarchy. My mother was a seamstress. She worked at the Estate as had her parents before her. My father, however, had arrived in Williams Ford as a transient, and his marriage to my mother had been controversial. He had “married a lease,” as the saying has it, and had been taken on as a stable hand at the Estate in lieu of a dowry. The law allowed such unions, but popular opinion frowned on it. We had few friends of our own class, my mother’s blood relations had since died (perhaps of embarrassment), and as a child I was often mocked and derided for my father’s low origins.

  On top of that was the issue of our religion. We were—because my father was—Church of Signs. In those days, every Christian church in America was required to have the formal approval of the Board of Registrars of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. (In popular parlance, “The Church of the Dominion,” but this was a misnomer, since every church is a Dominion Church if it is recognized by the Board. Dominion Episcopal, Dominion Presbyterian, Dominion Baptist—even the Catholic Church of America since it renounced its fealty to the Roman Pope in 2117—all are included under the Dominionist umbrella, since the purpose of the Dominion is not to be a church but to certify churches. In America we are entitled by the Constitution to worship at any church we please, as long as it is a genuine Christian congregation and not some fraudulent or satanistic sect. The Board exists to make that distinction. Also to collect fees and tithes to further its important work.)

  We were, as I said, Church of Signs, which was a marginal denomination, shunned by the leasing class, recognized but not fully endorsed by the Dominion, and popular mostly with illiterate indentured workers, among whom my father had been raised. Our faith took for its master text that passage in Mark which proclaims, “In my Name they will cast out devils, and speak in new tongues; they will handle serpents, and if they drink poison they will not be sickened by it.” We were snake-handlers, in other words, and famous beyond our modest numbers for it. Our congregation consisted of a dozen farmhands, mostly transients lately arrived from the southern states. My father was its deacon (though we did not use that name), and we kept snakes, for ritual purposes, in wire cages on our back acre, next to the outbuilding. This practice contributed very little to our social standing.

  That had been the situation of our family when Julian Comstock arrived as a guest of the Duncan and Crowley families, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, and when Julian and I met by coincidence while hunting.

  At that time I had been
apprenticed to my father, who had risen to the rank of an overseer at the Estate’s lavish and extensive stables. My father loved animals, especially horses.

  Unfortunately I was not made in the same mold, and my relations with the stable’s equine inhabitants rarely extended beyond a brisk mutual tolerance. I did not love my job—which consisted largely of sweeping straw, shoveling ordure, and doing in general those chores the older stablehands felt to be beneath their dignity—so I was pleased when it became customary for a household amanuensis (or even Sam Godwin in person) to arrive and summon me away from my work at Julian’s request. (Since the request emanated from a Comstock it couldn’t be overruled, no matter how fiercely the grooms and saddlers gnashed their teeth to see me escape their autocracy.)

  At first we met to read and discuss books, or hunt together; later, Sam Godwin invited me to audit Julian’s lessons, for he had been charged with Julian’s education as well as his general welfare. (I had been taught the rudiments of reading and writing at the Dominion school, and refined these skills under the tutelage of my mother, who believed in the power of literacy as an improving force. My father could neither read nor write.) And it was not more than a year after our first acquaintance that Sam presented himself one evening at my parents’ cottage with an extraordinary proposal.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hazzard,” Sam had said, putting his hand up to touch his cap (which he had removed when he entered the cottage, so that the gesture looked like a salute), “you know of course about the friendship between your son and Julian Comstock.”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “And worry over it often enough—matters at the Estate being what they are.”

  My mother was a small woman, plump, but forceful, with ideas of her own. My father, who spoke seldom, on this occasion spoke not at all, only sat in his chair holding a laurel-root pipe, which he did not light.

  “Matters at the Estate are exactly the crux of the issue,” Sam Godwin said. “I’m not sure how much Adam has told you about our situation there. Julian’s father, General Bryce Comstock, who was my friend as well as my commanding officer, shortly before his death charged me with Julian’s care and well-being—”