Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Sam did so, sitting back on his heels, anxiety inscribed upon his face. “Has it begun so soon? I thought they might wait for the New Year …”

  “I don’t know what has begun. I don’t think I know anything at all!” And so saying I leapt to my feet and ran out of the lifeless garden. I fled back to Rapture, who was tied to the tree where I had left him, nosing unproductively in the soft white snow.

  I had traveled perhaps an eighth of a mile back toward Williams Ford when another rider came up on my flank from behind.

  It was Ben Kreel himself. He touched his cap and said, “Do you mind if I ride with you a ways, Adam Hazzard?”

  I could hardly say no.

  Ben Kreel wasn’t a pastor—we had plenty of those in Williams Ford, each catering to his own denomination—but he was the appointed representative of the Athabaska branch of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth, almost as powerful in his way as the men who owned the Estate. And if he wasn’t technically a pastor, he was at least a sort of moral shepherd to the towns-people. He had been born right here in Williams Ford, son of a saddler; had been educated, at the Estate’s expense, at the Dominion College in Colorado Springs; and for the last twenty years he had taught elementary school five days a week and General Christianity on Sundays. I had marked my first letters on a slate board under Ben Kreel’s tutelage. Every Independence Day he addressed the townsfolk and reminded them of the symbolism and significance of the Thirteen Stripes and the Sixty Stars, and every Christmas he led the Ecumenical Service at the Dominion Hall.

  He was stout and gray at the temples, clean-shaven. He wore a woolen jacket, deerskin boots, and a packle hat not much grander than my own. But he carried himself with an immense dignity, as much in the saddle as on foot. The expression on his face was kindly, but that was no surprise; his expression was almost always kindly. “You’re out early, Adam,” he said. “What are you doing abroad at this hour?”

  I blushed down to my hair-roots. “Nothing,” I said. Is there any other word that so spectacularly represents everything it wants to deny? Under the circumstances, “nothing” amounted to a confession of bad intent. “Couldn’t sleep,” I added hastily. “Thought I might shoot a squirrel or so.” That would explain the rifle knotted across my saddlehorn, and it was at least remotely plausible, for the squirrels were still active, doing the last of their scrounging before settling in for the cold months.

  “On the day before Christmas?” Ben Kreel asked. “And in the copse on the grounds of the Estate? I hope the Duncans and Crowleys don’t hear about it! They’re jealous of their trees. And I’m sure gunfire would disturb them at this hour. Wealthy men and Easterners prefer to sleep past dawn, as a rule.”

  “I didn’t fire,” I muttered. “I thought better of it.”

  “Well, good. Wisdom prevails. You’re headed back to town?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me keep you company, then.”

  “Please do.” I could hardly say otherwise, no matter how I longed to be alone with my thoughts.

  Our horses moved slowly—the snow made for awkward footing—and Ben Kreel was silent for a while. Then he said, “You needn’t conceal your fears, Adam. I think I know what’s troubling you.”

  For a moment I had the terrible idea that Ben Kreel had been behind me in the hallway at the Estate, and that he had glimpsed Sam Godwin in his Old Testament paraphernalia. Wouldn’t that create a scandal! (And then I thought it was exactly such a scandal Sam must have feared all his life: it was worse even than being Church of Signs, for in some states a Jew can be fined or even imprisoned for practicing his faith. I didn’t know where Athabaska stood on the issue, but I feared the worst.)

  But Ben Kreel was talking about conscription, not about Sam.

  “I’ve already discussed this with some of the other boys in town,” he said. “You’re not alone, Adam, if you’re wondering what it all means, this military excitement, and what might happen as a result of it. And you’re something of a special case. I’ve been keeping an eye on you. From a distance, as it were. Here, stop a moment.”

  We had come to a bluff above the River Pine, looking south toward Williams Ford from a little height.

  “Gaze at that,” Ben Kreel said contemplatively. He stretched his arm out in an arc, as if to include not just the cluster of buildings that was the town but the empty fields as well, and the murky flow of the river, and the wheels of the mills, and even the shacks of the indentured laborers down in the low country. The valley seemed at once a living thing, inhaling the crisp atmosphere of the season and breathing out its steams, and a portrait, static in the still blue winter air. As deeply rooted as an oak and as fragile as a ball of Nativity glass.

  “Gaze at that,” Ben Kreel repeated. “Look at Williams Ford, laid out pretty there. What is it, Adam? More than a place, I think. It’s a way of life. It’s the sum of all our labors. It’s what our fathers gave us and it’s what we give our sons. It’s where we bury our mothers and where our daughters will be buried.” Here was more Philosophy, then, and after the turmoil of the morning I wasn’t sure I wanted any. But Ben Kreel’s voice ran on like the soothing syrup my mother used to administer whenever Flaxie or I came down with a cough. “Every boy in Williams Ford—every boy old enough to submit himself for national service—is just now discovering how reluctant he is to leave the only place he truly knows and loves. Even you, I suspect.”

  “I’m no more or less willing than anyone else.”

  “I’m not questioning your courage or your loyalty. It’s just that you’ve had a little taste of what life might be like elsewhere—or so I imagine, given how closely you associated yourself with Julian Comstock. Now, I’m sure Julian’s a fine young man and an excellent Christian. He could hardly be otherwise, could he, as the nephew of the man who holds the nation in his palm. But his experience has been very different from yours. He’s accustomed to cities—to movies like the one we saw at the Hall last night (and I glimpsed you there, didn’t I, sitting in the back pews?)—to books and ideas that might strike a youth of your background as exciting and, well, different. Am I wrong?”

  “I could hardly say you are, sir.”

  “And much of what Julian may have described to you is no doubt true. I’ve traveled some myself, you know, Adam. I’ve seen Colorado Springs, Pittsburgh—even New York City. Our Eastern cities are great, proud metropolises—some of the biggest and most productive in the world—and they’re worth defending, which is one reason we’re trying so hard to drive the Dutch out of Labrador.”

  “Surely you’re right.”

  “I’m glad you agree. Because there’s a trap certain young people are prey to. I’ve seen it before. A boy might think one of those great cities is a place he can run away to—a place where he can escape all the duties and obligations he learned at his mother’s knee. Simple things like faith and patriotism can feel to a young man like burdens, which might be shrugged off when they become too weighty.”

  “I’m not like that, sir,” I said, though every word he spoke seemed to have my name written all over it.

  “And there’s yet another element in the calculation. The conscription threatens to carry you out of Williams Ford; and the thought that runs through many boys’ minds is, if I must leave, then maybe I ought to leave on my own hook, and find my destiny on a city’s streets rather than in a battalion of the Athabaska Brigade … and you’re good to deny it, Adam, but you wouldn’t be human if such ideas didn’t occur to you.”

  “No, sir,” I muttered, and I felt my guilt increasing, for I had in fact been a little seduced by Julian’s tales of city life, and Sam’s dubious lessons, and the History of Mankind in Space—perhaps it was true that I had neglected my obligations to the village that lay so still and so inviting in the blue near distance.

  “I know,” Ben Kreel said, “things haven’t been easy for your family. Your father’s faith, in particular, has been a trial, and we haven’t always been good neighbors to you—spe
aking on behalf of the village as a whole. Perhaps you’ve been left out of activities other boys enjoy as a matter of course: picnics, games, friendships. . . . Well, even Williams Ford isn’t Paradise. But I promise you, Adam: if you find yourself in the Brigades, and especially if you find yourself tested in time of war, you’ll discover that the same boys who shunned you in the dusty streets of your home town become your best friends and bravest allies, and you theirs. For our common heritage knits us together in ways that may seem obscure, but become obvious under the harsh light of combat.”

  I had spent so much time smarting under the remarks of other boys (that my father “raised vipers the way other folks raise chickens,” for example) that I could hardly credit Ben Kreel’s assertion. But I knew very little of modern warfare, except what I had read in the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, so it might be true. And the prospect (as was intended) made me feel even more shame-faced.

  “There!” Ben Kreel said. “Do you hear that, Adam?”

  I did. I could hardly avoid it. The bell was clanging in the Dominion church steeple, announcing the early Ecumenical Service. It was a silvery sound on the winter air, at once lonesome and consoling, and I wanted almost to run toward it—to shelter in it, as if I were a child again.

  “They’ll be wanting me,” Ben Kreel said. “Will you excuse me if I ride ahead?”

  “No, sir. Please don’t mind about me.”

  “As long as we understand each other. Don’t look so downcast, Adam! The future may be brighter than you expect.”

  “Thank you for saying so, sir.”

  I stayed a while longer on the low bluff, watching as Ben Kreel’s horse carried him toward town. Even in the sunlight I felt the cold, and I shivered some, perhaps more because of the conflict in my mind than because of the weather. The Dominion man had made me ashamed of myself, and had put into perspective my loose ways of the last few years, and pointed up how many of my native beliefs I had abandoned before the seductive Philosophy of an agnostic Aristo and an aging Jew.

  Then I sighed and urged Rapture back along the path toward Williams Ford, meaning to explain to my parents where I had been, and to reassure them that I wouldn’t suffer too much in the coming conscription, to which I would willingly submit.

  I was so disheartened by the morning’s events that my eyes drifted toward the ground even as Rapture retraced his steps. As I have said, the snows of the night before lay largely undisturbed on this back trail between the town and the Estate. I could see where I had come through this morning, Rapture’s hoofprints having recorded the passage as clearly as figures in a book. Then I reached the place where Julian and I had parted the night before. There were more hoofprints here, in fact a crowd of them.

  And I saw something else written (in effect) on the snowy ground—something which alarmed me.

  I reined up at once.

  I looked south, toward Williams Ford. I looked east, the way Julian had gone last night.

  Then I took a bracing inhalation of icy air, and followed the trail that seemed to me most urgent.

  * “Grasp it where its neck ought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack its skull, hard and often enough to subdue it.” I had recounted these instructions to Julian, whose horror of serpents far exceeded my own: “I could never do such a thing!” he had exclaimed. This surfeit of timidity may surprise readers familiar with his later career.

  5

  The east-west road through Williams Ford was not heavily traveled, especially in winter.

  The southern road, which was called the “Wire Road” because the telegraph line runs alongside it, connected Williams Ford to the railhead at Connaught, and sustained a great deal of traffic. But the east-west road went essentially nowhere: it was a remnant of a road of the Secular Ancients, traversed mainly by Tipmen and freelance antiquarians, and then only in the warmer months. I suppose, if you followed the old road as far as it would take you, you might reach the Great Lakes, or somewhere farther east, in that direction; or you could ride the opposite way, and get yourself lost among washouts and landslips in the Rocky Mountains. But the railroad—and a parallel turnpike farther south—had obviated the need for all that trouble.

  Still, the east-west road was closely watched where it left the outskirts of Williams Ford. The Reserves had posted a man on a hill overlooking it, the same hill where Julian and Sam and I had paused for blackberries on our way from the Tip last October. But it was a fact that the Reserve troops were held in Reserve, and not sent to the front lines, mainly because of a disabling flaw of body or mind—some were wounded veterans, missing a hand or an arm; some were elderly; some were too simple or sullen to function in a disciplined body of men. I can’t say anything for certain about the soldier posted as lookout on the hill, but if he wasn’t a fool he was at least utterly unconcerned about concealment, for his silhouette (and the silhouette of his rifle) stood etched against the bright eastern sky for all to see. But maybe that was intentional, to let prospective fugitives know their way was barred.

  Not every way was barred, however, not for someone who had grown up in Williams Ford and hunted everywhere on its perimeter. Instead of following Julian directly I rode north a distance, and then through an encampment of indentured laborers, whose ragged children gaped at me from the glassless windows of their shanties, and whose soft-coal fires made a smoky gauze of the motionless air. This route connected with lanes cut through the wheat fields for the transportation of harvests and field-hands—lanes that had been deepened by years of use, so that I rode behind a berm of earth and snake rail fences, hidden from the distant sentinel. When I was safely east I came down a cattle-trail that reconnected me with the east-leading road, on which I was able to read the same signs that had alerted me back at Williams Ford, thanks to a fine layer of snow still undisturbed by any wind.

  Julian had come this way. He had done as he said he would, and ridden toward Lundsford before midnight. The snow had stopped soon after, leaving his horse’s prints clearly visible, though softened and half-covered.

  But his were not the only tracks. There was a second set, more crisply defined and hence more recent, probably set down during the night. This was what had caught my attention at the crossroads in Williams Ford: clear evidence of pursuit. Someone had followed Julian, without Julian’s knowledge. That had dire implications, the only redeeming circumstance being the fact of a single pursuer rather than a company of men. If the powerful people of the Estate had known it was Julian Comstock who had fled they would have sent an entire battalion to haul him back. I supposed Julian had been mistaken for an indentured fugitive or a lease-boy fleeing the conscription, and that he had been followed by some ambitious Reservist acting on his own initiative. Otherwise that whole imagined battalion might be right behind me—or perhaps soon would be, since Julian’s absence must have been noticed by now.

  I rode east, adding my own track to the previous set.

  It was a long ride. Noon came, and noon went, and more hours passed, and I began to have second thoughts as the sun angled toward its rendezvous with the southwestern horizon. What exactly did I hope to accomplish? To warn Julian? If so, I was a little late off the mark … though I hoped that at some point Julian had covered his tracks, or otherwise misled his pursuer, who didn’t have the advantage I had, of knowing where Julian meant to stay until Sam Godwin arrived. Failing that, I half-imagined rescuing Julian from capture, even though I had but a squirrel rifle and a few rounds of ammunition (plus a knife and my own wits, both feeble enough weapons) against whatever a Reservist might carry. In any case these were more wishes and anxieties than calculations or plans. I had no fully-formed plan beyond riding to Julian’s aid and telling him that I had delivered my message to Sam, who would follow along as soon as he could discreetly leave the Estate.

  And then what? It was a question I dared not ask—not out on this lonely road, well past the Tip now, farther than I had ever been from Williams Ford; not ou
t here where the flatlands stretched away on every side like the frosty Plains of Mars, and the wind, which had been absent all morning, began to pluck at the fringes of my coat; not when my own shadow was drawn out before me like a scarecrow gone riding. It was cold and getting colder, and soon the winter moon would be aloft, and me with only a few ounces of salt pork in my saddlebag and a dozen matches to make a fire, if I was able to secure any kindling by nightfall. I began to wonder if I had gone insane. I told myself that I could go back; that I hadn’t yet been missed; that it wasn’t too late to sit down to a Christmas Eve supper, and wake in time to hear the ringing-in of the Holiday and smell the goodness of Nativity apples drenched in cinnamon and brown sugar. I mused on it repeatedly, sometimes with tears in my eyes; but I let Rapture keep on carrying me toward the darkest part of the horizon.

  Then, after what seemed endless hours of dusk, with only a brief pause when both Rapture and I drank from a creek which had a skin of ice on it, I began to come among the ruins of the Secular Ancients.

  Not that there was anything spectacular about them. Fanciful drawings often portray the ruins of the last century as tall buildings, ragged and hollow as broken teeth, forming vine-encrusted canyons and shadowy cul-de-sacs.* No doubt such places exist—most of them in the uninhabitable Southwest, however, where “famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him,” which would rule out vines and such tropical items†—but most ruins were like the ones I now passed, mere irregularities (or more precisely, regularities) in the landscape, which indicated the former presence of foundations. These terrains were treacherous, often concealing deep basements that could open like hungry mouths on unwary travelers, and only Tipmen loved them. I was careful to keep to the path, though I began to wonder whether Julian would be as easy to find as I had imagined—“Lundsford” was a big locality, and the wind had begun to scour away the hoofprints I relied on for navigation.