Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Then, without prelude, she began to sing:

  By Piston, Loom, and Anvil, boys,

  We clothe and arm the nation,

  And sweat all day for a pauper’s pay

  And half a soldier’s ration ….

  There was shock at first. Many of the Eupatridians in the room knew this song, or had heard rebellious servants singing it from kitchens and cellars. If they didn’t know it intimately, they knew it by reputation. In any case the lyrics were explicit in their sympathy for the common man.

  The silence and gasps from her audience did not discourage Calyxa, though even the drummer faltered for a beat or two. She finished the chorus and ran right through the first verse, which—like every other verse in this long and encyclopedic song—decried the suffering of some class of laborer at the hands of an Industrialist or Owner.

  Heads turned toward President Deklan Comstock as if to gauge his reaction. Was he enraged? Insulted? Would the Republican Guard bring out their pistols and end the show abruptly?

  But Deklan Conqueror didn’t appear to be angry. He raised his hand, instead, in a kind of mock salute.

  That small gesture broadcast a signal among the Eupatridians that for tonight, at least, the usual proprieties had been suspended. They drew the inference that Calyxa’s performance was not a Protest but a kind of Show, ironically intended. Piston, Loom, and Anvil sung at the Executive Palace! It had the deliciously inverted logic of a bacchanal. A few of the more astute Aristos began to clap in time.

  That caused the orchestra to take courage and join in. The musicians were all familiar with the tune, and began to work little trills and arpeggios around Calyxa’s powerful voice. Calyxa herself carried on as if none of these nuances mattered: it was the song she meant to sing, and she was singing it.

  “Bless her,” said Julian, who had come to stand beside me.

  Some in the room still didn’t appreciate the incongruous performance. Mr. Wieland, Mr. Palumbo, and Deacon Hollingshead stood in a single dour knot, arms crossed. Because they worked directly with indentured men, Wieland and Palumbo knew the song for what it was: a dagger aimed at their livelihoods. Deacon Hollingshead had no such direct interest, though he was a stalwart supporter of the status quo, and perhaps had tortured men who dared such verses in his presence. Even the President’s indulgence could not persuade these worthies to relax their vigilance.

  In fact I began to worry about their health. Wieland’s already ruddy complexion deepened, until his head came to resemble a beet embedded in a shirt collar, and Palumbo wasn’t far behind in this competition.

  Julian had once told me a story about deep-sea divers. In recent times it had become possible for Tipmen in sealed rubber suits, supported by air pumped to them from the surface, to descend into the murky waters around the ruins of seaside cities. This was an occasionally lucrative but wildly dangerous pursuit. It often yielded fresh treasure from sites that had, on land, been picked clean. But for every valuable antiquity thus obtained, a man’s life was put at risk.

  It is a peculiar quality of the oceans that the pressure of the water increases with depth. There was a legend among these undersea Tipmen, Julian had said, that a diver, if he came untethered in deep enough water, might sink so far that the fist of the sea would squeeze him to death. Worse, the water pressure would literally roll him up like a tube of tooth-paste. His body, encased in rubber, would be crushed and then forced into his enclosing helmet, so that the whole of him would at last be concentrated in that steel shell like a bloody stew in an inverted bowl—until even the helmet itself exploded!

  This was, of course, usually fatal.

  I thought about that legend (which, for all I know, may be true) as I looked at Wieland, Palumbo, and Hollingshead. With every succeeding verse—the one about the buried coal-miner, the one about the seamstress reduced to penury and prostitution by her employer, the one about the railway porter bisected by a runaway train—yet more blood rushed to the crania of these indignant gentlemen, until I wondered whether they would simply drop dead or whether their skulls would burst like pressed grapes.

  Calyxa, if anything, was slightly miffed by the genial reception she was now receiving. She cranked out even more radical verses, which named Owners as Tyrants and Senators as Fools. “I’m not sure this is especially decorous,” said Mrs. Comstock from beside me. But the President continued to grin (though his grin was far from mirthful), and the Eupatridians, by and large, continued to mistake insult for irony, and smirked at the joke of it.

  I began to think Calyxa’s inventive powers had been exhausted—which might have been a good thing—when she stepped to the very edge of the bandstand. Aiming her gaze directly and unmistakably at the industrialist Nelson Wieland, and still pounding the stage with her foot, she sang:

  I know someone, a blacksmith’s son,

  Who learned to mill old steel—

  He cast the parts

  For rich men’s carts,

  But the heat took a toll,

  And the fumes of the coal—

  He was broken at the wheel, oh!

  Broken at the wheel!

  By Piston, Loom, and Anvil, boys,

  We clothe and arm the nation …

  If there was any doubt whether she had improvised this verse for the specific benefit of Mr. Wieland, he didn’t share it. His eyes started from their sockets. He clenched his fists—in fact his entire body seemed to clench. It was as if the deep ocean had taken him in its grip.

  Then, apparently satisfied with the reaction she had produced, Calyxa finished the chorus and addressed the agriculturalist Billy Palumbo, singing:

  The indentured men in the Owner’s pen

  Are bought and sold like cattle;

  But a man’s got a mind,

  And an Owner might find

  That all he bought

  Is an awful lot

  Of Revolutionary Chattel, oh!

  Revolutionary Chattel …

  Mr. Palumbo was not accustomed to this kind of insolence any more than Mr. Wieland was. I watched with profound apprehension as the veins in and around his face stood forth. The legend of the explosive Diving Tipmen came once more to my mind.

  Then, inevitably, it was Deacon Hollingshead’s turn. As she repeated the chorus the Deacon glared viciously. But Calyxa had faced down Job and Utty Blake, and she was not to be intimidated by a mere Dominion cleric, no matter how powerful. Her voice was her cudgel, and she meant to use it. She sang—con brio, as the composers say—

  The Colorado maid was not afraid

  When the Deacon’s henchmen caught her,

  She suffered in her pride,

  But they beat her till she cried,

  And when her courage grew thin

  She confessed her sin:

  “I was kissed by the Deacon’s daughter! Oh!

  Kissed by the Deacon’s daughter!”

  By Piston, Loom, and Anvil, boys …

  There was a sudden flash of light, and a thunderous report—I looked apprehensively at Deacon Hollingshead—but the Deacon was intact—it was only that the fireworks had begun out on the Great Lawn. The band abruptly ceased playing, and we all adjourned outside with a certain sense of relief.

  Calyxa sat next to me, breathless from her exertions, and I was very proud of her, though very worried, as the Independence Day fireworks crackled through the hot night air above the Executive Palace.

  She had probably just scotched any possibility that my Commongold pamphlet would receive the Dominion Stamp of Approval. But that didn’t matter much—the pamphlet was doing well enough without it. In any case, if it had been Deklan Comstock’s intention to humiliate Calyxa, I believed he had gotten more than he bargained for.

  For the duration of the fireworks display we sat on wooden bleachers. There was a special box reserved for the President and a few close allies, including, I was dismayed to see, Deacon Hollingshead. Calyxa and I sat with Julian and Sam and Mrs. Comstock among the lesser Eupatridians.r />
  “There are portents to be read at any event like this,” Sam said in a low voice. “Who attends, who doesn’t—who speaks to whom—who smiles, who frowns—it can all be read, the way a fortune-teller reads a deck of cards.”

  “What fortune do you divine?” I asked.

  “The Admiral of the Navy isn’t here. That’s unusual. There are no representatives from the Army of the Californias—ominous indeed. The Dominion is favored. The Senate is ignored.”

  “I don’t know that I can parse such signs.”

  “We’ll learn more when the President speaks. That’s when the axe will fall, Adam—if it does fall.”

  “Is the axe literal or metaphorical?” I inquired anxiously.

  “Remains to be seen,” said Sam.

  That was alarming; but the matter was out of my control, and I tried to enjoy the fireworks while they lasted. The Chinese Ambassador had arranged for the importation of some incendiaries from his own Republic, as a gift to the President. The Chinese are experts in armaments and gunpowder. In fact the presence of that Ambassador, and his obvious largesse, propelled a rumor that Deklan Comstock was attempting to buy advanced weapons from China as a sort of riposte to the Chinese Cannon of the Dutch.*

  Certainly the celestial fire was an excellent advertisement for Chinese workmanship. I had never seen such a display. Oh, we had had fireworks in Williams Ford—fine ones, and they had impressed me in my youth. But this event was altogether more spectacular. The warm summer air was alive with the smell of cordite, and the sky crackled with Occult Starbursts, Blue Fire, Whirling Salamanders, Keg-Breakers, and other such exotic devices. It was almost as noisy as an artillery duel, and I had to restrain myself from flinching when the bangs and stinks provoked unhappy memories of the War. But I reminded myself that this was Independence Day in Manhattan, not winter in Chicoutimi; and Calyxa put a soothing arm around me when she saw that I was shaking.

  The spectacle concluded after a good half-hour with a Cross of Fire that hung over Lower Manhattan like the benediction of an incendiary Angel. The band played The Star-spangled Banner. The assembled Eupatridians applauded vigorously; and then it was time for Deklan Comstock to make the final speech of the evening.

  The Executive Palace was fully electrified, powered by dynamos designed and operated by the Union’s most cunning engineers. A fierce artificial light drenched the stage that was set up for the President.* He stepped up on the makeshift wooden platform and braced his hands on both sides of the podium. Then he began to speak.

  He began with homilies and platitudes appropriate to the occasion. He spoke about the Nation and how it was formed in an act of rebellion against the godless British Empire. He quoted the great Patriotic Philosopher of the nineteenth century, Mr. John C. Calhoun. He described how the original Nation had been debased by oil and atheism, until the Reconstruction that followed on the heels of the False Tribulation. He spoke of the two great Generals who had served as Presidents in times of national crisis, Washington and Otis, and flung about their names as if they were personal friends of his.

  That eventually got him onto the subject of war. Here his voice became more animated, and his gestures bespoke a personal urgency.

  “Perpetual peace is a dream,” he said, “as much as we may yearn for it—but war! War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe, without which the world would be swamped in selfishness and materialism. War is the very vessel of honor, and who of us could endure a world without the divine folly of honor? That faith is especially true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, during a campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.† On the field of battle, where a man lives or dies by the caprice of a bullet or the verdict of a bayonet, life is at its best and healthiest.”

  “That’s a novel definition of health,” said Julian, but Sam hushed him.

  “To date,” Deklan Conqueror declared, “we have had some notable successes in Labrador and some regrettable failures. Failure is inevitable in any war, I need not add. Not every campaign will be brought to a successful conclusion. But the number of failures in recent months points to a dismaying possibility. I mean the possibility that treason rather than fortune is at work in the Army of the Laurentians.” The President’s countenance became abruptly grim and judicial, and his audience cringed. “For that reason I have today taken bold steps to consolidate and improve our armed forces. Several Major Generals—I will not name them—have been taken into custody as I speak. They will undergo public trials, and be given every opportunity to acknowledge and recant their plotting with the Dutch.”

  Sam groaned quietly, for the unnamed Major Generals probably included men he knew and respected.

  “The places of these traitors,” Deklan Conqueror continued, “will be filled from the ranks of enlisted men who have distinguished themselves in battle. Because of this we can look forward to renewed success in our effort to establish control over this sacred continent as a whole and the strategically important waterway to the north of it.”

  He paused to sip from a glass of water. Absent fireworks, the night seemed very dark.

  “But not all the news is bad. Far from it! We have had our share of successes. I need only cite the example of the Saguenay Campaign and the rescue of the town of Chicoutimi from its Mitteleuropan occupiers. And let me repeat, acknowledging a certain familial pride, that a key role in that battle was played by my own nephew Julian.”

  Here the President smiled once more, and paused in the way that invites applause, which the nervous Eupatridians hastened to give him.

  “Come up here, Julian,” the President called out, “and stand beside me!”

  This was the humiliation Deklan Comstock had been storing up all evening. Putting Calyxa on show as a singer was only the prelude to it. He would have the son of the man he had murdered stand beside him as an ornament, helpless to protest.

  Julian at first didn’t move. It was as if the command had scarcely registered on his senses. It was Sam who urged him out of the bleachers. “Just do as he says,” Sam whispered in a mournful voice. “Swallow your pride, Julian, this once, and do as he says—go on, or he’ll have us all killed.”

  Julian gave Sam a vacant look, but he stood up. His journey to the Presidential Podium was visibly reluctant. He mounted the steps to the stage as if he were mounting a scaffold to be hanged, which was perhaps not far from the truth.

  “Dear Julian,” the President said, and embraced him just as if he were a true and loving uncle.

  Julian didn’t return the embrace. He kept his hands stiffly at his sides. I could see that any physical contact with the fratricidal Chief Executive was nauseating to him.

  “You’ve seen more of war than most of us, though you’re still a very young man. What was your impression of the Saguenay Campaign?”

  Julian blinked at the question.

  “It was a bloody business,” he mumbled.

  But Deklan Comstock didn’t mean to give his nephew the freedom of the podium. “Bloody indeed,” the President said. “But we’re not a nation that flinches at blood, nor are we a people constrained by feminine delicacy. To us all is permitted—even cruelty, yes, even ruthlessness—for we’re the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from bondage. We must not be miserly with blood! Let there be blood, if blood alone can drown the old secular world. Let there be pain, and let there be death, if pain and death will save us from the twin tyrannies of Atheism and Europe.”

  Some cheering erupted, though not from our part of the bleachers.

  “Julian knows first-hand the price and preciousness of liberty. He has already risked his life anonymously as a soldier of the line. Sacrifice enough for any man, you might say, and in normal times I would agree. But these aren’t normal times. The enemy presses. Barbarous weapons are
deployed against our soldiers. The Northeastern wilds swarm with foreign encampments, and the precincts of Newfoundland are once again in jeopardy. Therefore we are called upon to make sacrifices.” He paused at that ominous word. “We are all called upon to make sacrifices. I don’t exclude myself! I, as much as any citizen, have to forego my own happiness, if it contradicts the greater national purpose. And as pleased as I am to have my brother’s son back in the bosom of my family, a soldier with Julian’s skill can’t be spared at this critical hour. For that reason I have already relieved from duty Major General Griffin of the Northern Division of the Army of the Laurentians, and I intend to replace him with my own beloved nephew.”

  The audience gasped at the boldness of the proclamation. It was a great benevolence on the part of the President, or so he wanted us to think. The Eupatridians burst into another round of applause. Encouraging shouts of “Julian! Julian Comstock!” went up into the gunpowder-scented night.

  But Julian’s mother didn’t join in the bellowing. She seemed to grow weak, and put her head on Calyxa’s shoulder.

  “First Bryce,” she whispered. “Now Julian.”

  “This is the axe I spoke of,” said Sam.

  * At first I thought the immigrant Egyptians might also be Jews, since they worshipped at unusual temples of their own; but this was not the case, Sam said.

  * The Head and Arm were fragments of the Colossus of Liberty, Julian said. According to legend the Colossus used to stand astride the Verrazano Narrows, while boats and barges passed between her feet. A cursory inspection shows that the scale is off, and Liberty would not have been able to span the distance even with her legs splayed at an unflattering angle. Still, she must once have been a very large and prominently visible Statue—I don’t mean to diminish her grandeur.