Annotation
From the Hugo-winning author of Spin, an exuberant adventure in a post-climate-change America.
In the reign of President Deklan Comstock, a reborn United States is struggling back to prosperity. Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the Plague of Infertility, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York City. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation’s spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again.
Then out of Labrador come tales of a new Ajax—Captain Commongold, the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay. The ordinary people follow his adventures in the popular press. The Army adores him. The President is troubled. Especially when the dashing Captain turns out to be his nephew Julian, son of the falsely accused and executed Bryce.
Treachery and intrigue dog Julian’s footsteps. Hairsbreadth escapes and daring rescues fill his days. Stern resolve and tender sentiment dice for Julian’s soul, while his admiration for the works of the Secular Ancients, and his adherence to the evolutionary doctrines of the heretical Darwin, set him at fatal odds with the hierarchy of the Dominion. Plague and fire swirl around the Presidential palace when at last he arrives with the acclamation of the mob.
As told by Julian’s best friend and faithful companion, a rustic yet observant lad from the west, this tale of the 22nd Century asks—and answers—the age-old question: “Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”
Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2010.
Julian Comstock: a Story of 22-nd Century America
PROLOGUE
ACT ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
ACT TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
ACT THREE
1
2
3
4
ACT FOUR
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
ACT FIVE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Julian Comstock: a Story of 22-nd Century America
by Robert Charles Wilson
We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.
—JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
Look not for roses in Attalus his garden, or wholesome flowers in a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce any one bad, but some others are the worse for him, tempt not contagion by proximity, and hazard not thyself in the shadow of corruption.
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Crowns, generally speaking, have thorns.
—ARTHUR E. HERTZLER
To Mr. William Taylor Adams of Massachusetts , who might not have approved of it, this book is nevertheless respectfully and gratefully dedicated.
PROLOGUE
I mean to set down here the story of the life and adventures of Julian Comstock, better known as Julian the Agnostic or (after his uncle) Julian Conqueror.
Readers familiar with the name will naturally expect scenes of blood and betrayal, including the War in Labrador and Julian’s run-in with the Church of the Dominion. I witnessed all those events firsthand, and at closer proximity than I might have liked, and they are all described in the five “Acts” (as I call them) that follow. In the company of Julian Comstock I traveled from the pine-bark Eden in which I was born all the way to Mascouche , Lake Melville , Manhattan , and stranger places; I saw men and governments rise and fall; and I woke many a morning with death staring me in the face. Some of the memories I mean to set down aren’t pleasant ones, or flattering, and I tremble a little at the prospect of reliving them, but I intend to spare no one—we were what we were, and we became what we became, and the facts will ennoble or demean us, as the reader chooses to see it.
But I begin the story the way it began for me—in a town in the boreal west, when Julian was young, and I was young, and neither of us was famous.
ACT ONE
A PINE-BARK EDEN
or THE CARIBOU-HORN TRAIN
CHRISTMAS, 2172
And the same fires, which were kindled for Heretics, will serve for the destruction of Philosophers.
—HUME, a Philosopher
1
In October of 2172—the year the Election show came to town—Julian Comstock and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to the Tip east of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one of his heresies.
There was a certain resolute promptness to the seasons in Athabaska in those days. Summers were long and hot, December brought snow and sudden freezes, and most years the River Pine ran freely by the first of March. Spring and fall were mere custodial functions, by comparison. Today might be the best we would get of autumn—the air brisk but not cold, the long sunlight unhindered by any cloud. It was a day we ought to have spent under Sam Godwin’s tutelage, reading chapters from The Dominion History of the Union or Otis’s War and How to Conduct It.
But Sam wasn’t a heartless overseer, and the gentle weather suggested the possibility of an outing. So we went to the stables where my father worked, and drew horses, and rode out of the Estate with lunches of black bread and salt ham in our back-satchels.
At first we headed south along the Wire Road , away from the hills and the town. Julian and I rode ahead while Sam paced his mount behind us, his Pittsburgh rifle in the saddle holster at his side. There was no perceptible threat or danger, but Sam Godwin believed in preparedness—if he had a gospel, it was BE PREPARED; also, SHOOT FIRST; and probably, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES. Sam, who was nearly fifty winters old, wore a dense brown beard stippled with white hairs, and was dressed in what remained presentable of his Army of the Californias uniform. Sam was nearly a father to Julian, Julian’s own true father having performed a gallows dance some years before, and lately Sam had been more vigilant than ever, for reasons he hadn’t discussed, at least with me.
Julian was my age (seventeen), and we were approximately the same height, but there the resemblance ended. Julian had been born an Aristo, or Eupatridian, as they say back east, while my family was of the leasing class. His face was smooth and pale; mine was dark and lunar, scarred by the same Pox that took my sister Flaxie to her grave in ’63. His yellow hair was long and almost femininely clean; mine was black and wiry, cut to stubble by my mother with her sewing scissors, and I washed it once a week—more often in summer, when the creek behind the cottage warmed to a pleasant temperature. His clothes were linen and silk, brass-buttoned, cut to fit; my shirt and pants were coarse hempen cloth, sewn to a good approximation but clearly not the work of a New York tailor.