He has a novel in progress. Your press prints novels as well as newspapers, doesn’t it, Mr. Hungerford?”
“We have a modest line of bound thrillers.”
Julian asked me if my novel could be considered “thrilling.”
“It has pirates in it,” I said.
“There you are, then! Adam is a proven best-seller, and he’s writing a book with pirates and other exciting persons in it—and here he is standing in your office!”
“I’ll have a contract drawn up,” Hungerford murmured.
“Mr. Hungerford is a canny businessman, Adam. He wants to publish your novel. Will the terms be generous, Mr. Hungerford?”
Hungerford quoted a colossal number, which he said was his standard rate for first-time novelists. I was quite taken aback, and probably turned as white in the face as Lawyer Lingley had when he recognized the President’s nephew. I could not speak. My toes and fingers were numb.
“Good,” Julian said. “But is Adam really a first-time novelist?—given the success of his previous work, I mean.”
Hungerford nodded woodenly and announced a number twice as cosmic. I might have fainted, if I had not had the desk to lean on.
“Is the number acceptable, Adam?”
I allowed that it was.
“As for Mr. Dornwood—” Julian began.
“He’ll be fired immediately,” Hungerford said.
“Please don’t do that! I’m sure Adam doesn’t want to punish Mr. Dornwood any further, now that the error had been corrected.”
“I guess that’s right,” I managed to say. “I won’t hold a grudge against any man. You can keep your job, Dornwood, for all of me. Although—”
Dornwood gave me a pleading look. He was no longer the smug Manhattanite. He might have been some condemned slave kneeling before a Pharaoh for clemency. It was an unusual sensation to hold another man’s fate in my hands. I could ask for his apology, I supposed. I supposed I could ask for his head, too, and Hungerford would have it delivered it to me on a china plate. But I’m not a vindictive person.
“I want your typewriter,” I said.
* * *
They say the typewriter was invented in 1870 or thereabouts. It has had many incarnations in the centuries since. It went out of production even before the End of Oil, and was re-introduced only recently. Modern typewriters are made by hand, by craftsmen who have studied innumerable rusty remains rescued from various Tips. They are expensive to buy, and costly to maintain. They’re also very heavy. Julian and I took turns carrying Dornwood’s typewriter down the street to a taxi stand.
“Say something,” Julian suggested, “or I’ll think you’ve lost your tongue.”
“I’m out of words entirely.”
“Unfortunate condition for a writer to be in.”
That brought me up short.
Was I a writer, in the professional sense? I guessed I was. Hungerford and his lawyer had meant for me to sign a quit-claim this afternoon. Instead I had signed a contract to write a novel, and inked my name on a receipt for Theodore Dornwood’s writing machine. Probably those two items, the contract and the typewriter, were acceptable bona fides in the author’s trade.
I said to Julian, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Do what?”
“What you did at the Spark. Command obedience. Hungerford practically bowed to you.”
As long as I had known Julian I had known he was an Aristo. And I knew Aristos were meant to be respected and obeyed. But we had ignored that dictum as boys, and been forced to ignore it as soldiers, and agreed to ignore it as friends, and it was seldom topmost in my mind. I reminded myself that to a stranger, even a highly-placed businessman such as Mr. Hungerford, Julian was no more or less than a member of the family of the reigning President. No doubt Hungerford imagined that a word from Julian to his uncle would cause the Spark to be shut down and placed under a permanent Dominion sanction. That was the kind of power Deklan Conqueror was able to exercise.
By implication—at least in the mind of Hungerford and his lawyer—it was Julian’s power as well.
“It’s a handy thing,” Julian said as we maneuvered first the typewriter and then ourselves into an available cab, “to invoke the family name now and then.”
“It must be daunting to possess such power, and to wield it.”
“The power is all Deklan’s, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps not all. You borrowed a little of it just now.”
“I don’t want it. The thought of it sickens me. The power to do good—that’s the power I’d like to wield,” said Julian.
“Anyone can do good in the world, Julian, to some degree.” Or so my mother had often told me, and the Dominion Reader for Young Persons concurred.
“The kind of good I want to do requires the kind of power few men possess.”
“What kind of good is it, that wants such muscle?”
But Julian wouldn’t answer.
* * *
Calyxa wasn’t impressed by the typewriter. She pointed out all its dents and scars—which were many, for the machine had been carried to Labrador and back at least once, and had seen hard service under Dornwood. It still smelled a little of liquor and burnt hemp. But it was serviceable and well-oiled, and did its job uncomplainingly.
Calyxa also reminded me that I didn’t know how to type. There was a skill associated with it. I could find letters and poke them, but this was a relatively laborious way to conduct business. She told me she had seen a booklet at Grogan’s called Typewriting Self-Taught, and I promised her I would buy myself a copy, even if it cost as much as a Charles Curtis Easton novel.
If she was cynical about the typewriter, she was genuinely pleased by the news that I had signed a contract for my novel, and that Dornwood’s royalties for Julian Commongold had been consigned to me. We would have money of our own, in other words, and there was the solid promise of more to come.
“So we won’t be running off to Buffalo ,” she said.
“We can support ourselves in New York City. You can sing in cafés or not, as the mood suits you.”
“Assuming we survive the Independence Day festivities at the Executive Palace.”
I wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “Julian’s almost certain no harm will come to us there.”
“Almost certain,” she said. “That’s almost reassuring.”
* * *
There was a sound like gunfire in the street that night.
I rose and went to the bedroom window. The window had been left open in order to soften the heat in the upper stories of the house, though barely a breeze was blowing.
I put my head outside. Manhattan lay quiet in the midnight darkness. I could hear the rustling of draped flags and the creek of insects. The bones of Sky-Scrapers cut angular silhouettes out of the stars, and here and there the fulgent glow of distant foundries smoldered. Down below, in the stables attached to the house, a sleepless horse snuffled and tapped its shod hoof on the ground.
More explosions followed, and the sound of stifled laughter. A crew of five or six boys dashed out between two of the row houses, lit punks glowing in their hands. Offended voices hailed them from other windows.
What I had taken for gunshots was only the sound of exploding fire-crackers, tossed about by mischievous children in anticipation of the Fourth of July. Julian and I had played the same kind of tricks back in Williams Ford in our younger days. The dairymen had despised us for it, and claimed our concussions dried up the milk in the udders of their cows.