Indeed, Tom Shearney was seated less than a yard away from us, squirming unhappily and casting resentful glances at the Reserve men.
“But after the balloting—”
“This isn’t about balloting. This is about conscription.”
“Conscription!”
“Hush!” Julian said hastily, shaking his hair out of his pale face. “You’ll start a stampede. I didn’t think it would begin so soon… but we’ve had certain telegrams from New York about setbacks in Labrador , and the call-up of new divisions. Once the balloting is finished the Campaigners will probably announce a recruitment drive, and take the names of everyone present and survey them for the names and ages of their children.”
“We’re too young to be drafted,” I said, for we were both just seventeen.
“Not according to what I’ve heard. The rules have been changed. Oh, you can probably find a way to hide out when the culling begins—and get away with it, considering how far we are from anywhere else. But my presence here is well-known. I don’t have a mob or family to melt away into. In fact it’s probably not a coincidence that so many Reserves have been sent to such a little village as Williams Ford.”
“What do you mean, not a coincidence?”
“My uncle has never been happy about my existence. He has no children of his own. No heirs. He sees me as a possible competitor for the Executive.”
“But that’s absurd. You don’t want to be President—do you?”
“I would sooner shoot myself. But Uncle Deklan has a jealous bent, and he distrusts the motives of my mother in protecting me.”
“How does a draft help him?”
“The entire draft is not aimed at me, but I’m sure he finds it a useful tool. If I’m drafted, no one can complain that he’s excepting his own family from the general conscription. And when he has me in the infantry he can be sure I find myself on the front lines in Labrador—performing some noble but suicidal trench attack.”
“But—Julian! Can’t Sam protect you?”
“Sam is a retired soldier; he has no power except what arises from the patronage of my mother. Which isn’t worth much in the coin of the present realm. Adam, is there another way out of this building?”
“Only the door, unless you mean to break a pane of that colored glass that fills the windows.”
“Somewhere to hide, then?”
I thought about it. “Maybe,” I said. “There’s a room behind the stage where the religious equipment is stored. You can enter it from the wings. We could hide there, but it has no door of its own.”
“It’ll have to do. If we can get there without attracting attention.” But that was not too difficult, for the torchieres had not all been re-lit, much of the hall was still in shadow, and the audience was milling about a bit, and stretching, while the Campaigners prepared to record the vote that was to follow—they were meticulous accountants even though the final tally was a foregone conclusion and the ballrooms were already booked for Deklan Conqueror’s latest inauguration. Julian and I shuffled from one shadow to another, giving no appearance of haste, until we were close to the foot of the stage; there we paused at an entrance to the storage room, until a goonish Reserve man who had been eyeing us was called away by a superior officer to help dismantle the projecting equipment. We ducked through the curtained door into near-absolute darkness. Julian stumbled over some obstruction (a piece of the church’s tack piano, which had been disassembled for cleaning in 2165
by a traveling piano-mechanic, who had died of a stroke before finishing the job), the result being a woody “clang!” that seemed loud enough to alert the whole occupancy of the church, but evidently didn’t. What little light there was came through a high glazed window that was hinged so that it could be opened in summer for purposes of ventilation. It was a weak sort of illumination, for the night was cloudy, and only the torches along the main street were shining. But it registered as our eyes adjusted to the dimness. “Perhaps we can get out that way,” Julian said.
“Not without a ladder. Although—”
“What? Speak up, Adam, if you have an idea.”
“This is where they store the risers—the long wooden blocks the choir stands on when they’re racked up for a performance. Perhaps those—”
But he was already examining the shadowy contents of the storage room, as intently as he had surveyed the Tip for ancient books. We found the likely suspects, and managed to stack them to a useful height without causing too much noise. (In the church hall, the Campaigners had already registered a unanimous vote for Deklan Comstock and had begun to break the news about the conscription drive. Some few voices were raised in futile objection; Ben Kreel was calling loudly for calm—no one heard us rearranging the unused furniture.)
The window was at least ten feet high, and almost too narrow to crawl through, and when we emerged on the other side we had to hang by our fingertips before dropping to the ground. I bent my right ankle awkwardly as I landed, though no lasting harm was done.
The night, already cold, had turned colder. We were near the hitching posts, and the horses whinnied at our surprising arrival and blew steam from their gaping nostrils. A fine, gritty snow had begun to fall. There was not much wind, however, and Christmas banners hung limply in the frigid air. Julian made straight for his horse and loosed its reins from the post. “What are we going to do?” I asked.
“You, Adam, will do nothing but protect your own existence as best you know how; while I—” But he balked at pronouncing his plans, and a shadow of anxiety passed over his face. Events were moving rapidly in the realm of the aristos, events I could barely comprehend.
“We can wait them out,” I said, a little desperately. “The Reserves can’t stay in Williams Ford forever.”
“No. Unfortunately neither can I, for Deklan Conqueror knows where to find me, and has made up his mind to remove me from the game of politics like a captured chesspiece.”
“But where will you go? And what—”
He put a finger to his mouth. There was a noise from the front of the Dominion Church Hall, as of the doors being thrown open, and voices of congregants arguing or wailing over the news of the conscription drive. “Ride with me,” Julian said. “Quick, now!”
We did not follow the main street, but caught a path that turned behind the blacksmith’s barn and through the wooded border of the River Pine, north in the general direction of the Estate. The night was dark, and the horses stepped slowly, but they knew the path almost by instinct, and some light from the town still filtered through the thinly falling snow, which touched my face like a hundred small cold fingers.
“It was never possible that I could stay at Williams Ford forever,” Julian said. “You ought to have known that, Adam.”
Truly, I should have. It was Julian’s constant theme, after alclass="underline" the impermanence of things. I had always put this down to the circumstances of his childhood, the death of his father, the separation from his mother, the kind but aloof tutelage of Sam Godwin.
But I could not help thinking once more of THE HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE and the photographs in it—not of the First Men on the Moon, who were Americans, but of the Last Visitors to that celestial sphere, who had been Chinamen, and whose “space suits” had been firecracker-red. Like the Americans, they had planted their flag in expectation of more visitations to come; but the End of Oil and the False Tribulation had put paid to those plans.
And I thought of the even lonelier Plains of Mars, photographed by machines (or so the book alleged) but never touched by human feet. The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places. Somehow I had stumbled into one. The snow squall ended; the uninhabited moon came through the clouds; and the winter fields of Williams Ford glowed with an unearthly luminescence.