The enclosed grounds of the Palace make up a rectangle two and a half miles long by half a mile wide, carved out of Manhattan by a man named Olmsted in ancient times. Pleasant and rustic by day, in the small hours of the night it was a lonely place. It hosted a large permanent population of bureaucrats, servants, and Republican Guards; but the majority of them had been asleep since midnight. Now even the revelries of the Wrap Party had ceased. Little evidence remained of what had taken place earlier in the evening, apart from a pair of Aesthetes snoring in wicker chairs along the Palace’s great piazza.
Not every member of the Republican Guard was allowed to sleep, however. They kept the watch in shifts, like sailors. They manned the four great Gates at all times, and patrolled the high walls for intruders. Lymon Pugh was one of them, and he met me as I was leaving the Palace. “On duty still?” I asked him.
“Just coming off it. Felt like walking a little before going to bed, the night air being so warm.”
The moon was up. A mist rose from the nearby Pond and put its pale fingers into the ailanthus groves edging the lawn. “This weather seems strange to me,” I said. “In Athabaska we often had snow by Thanksgiving. And in Labrador, too, of course. Not here, though … not this year.”
“Let me walk a little way with you, Adam. I have no other business, and I doubt I could sleep, to be honest.”
“Sleep is an elusive quarry some nights,” I agreed. “Do you enjoy doing this work for Julian?”
“I guess I don’t mind it. It was kind of him to select me, and there’s no heavy lifting involved. I don’t expect it to last, though. No offense to Julian Commongold—Comstock, I mean—but I’m not sure he’s altogether suited to the Presidency.”
“Why do you say so?”
“From what I’ve seen, it’s one of those jobs like being a line overseer at a packing factory—it rewards ruthlessness, and it kills whatever goodness a man might have in him. I knew a Seattle man who was hired up to be a line overseer at the factory where I worked. A generous man, saintly to his children, well-liked all around; but they made him a line boss, and after a week in that job I heard him threaten to cut a man’s throat for slowness. He meant it, too. Began to carry a razor in his hip pocket. Flaunted it from time to time.”
“That’s how you see Julian?”
“It’s not that he’s bad by nature. He isn’t. That’s just the problem. A truly bad man would have an easier time as President, and probably make a greater success of it.”
“Must a President be bad, then?”
“It seems so to me. But I don’t know much history—maybe it hasn’t always been that way.” We walked a little farther, listening to the soft sound our shoes made on the gravel path. “My point, though,” Lymon Pugh said, “is that Julian’s not succeeding in the Presidency, whatever the reason for it. I know you and your family are planning your get-away—”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me anything, but I hear things. I don’t repeat what I hear, if that’s on your mind.”
“No—what you say is true. I hope it isn’t necessary to flee the country. But it never hurts to know where the back door is. Come with us, Lymon, if the worst happens, God forbid. Calyxa has good things to say about Mediterranean France.”
“Thank you for asking, Adam. That’s very flattering to me. But I wouldn’t know what to do in a foreign country. I don’t know France from Canaan. If it comes to that I mean to steal a horse and head west, maybe as far as the Willamette Valley.”
We came to the guest-house where Calyxa and Flaxie and I had made our temporary home. I felt unaccountably sad; but I didn’t want Lymon Pugh to see that emotion, or hear it in my voice, so I did not speak.
“You have a fine family, Adam Hazzard,” he said. “You make sure nothing unpleasant happens to them. That’s your task, if you don’t mind taking advice from a plain Republican Guardsman. And now I’m off to bed.” He turned away. “Goodnight!”
“Goodnight,” I managed.
I paused at the door as Lymon Pugh headed back toward the Palace.
The night had that unusual calm which marks the hour before the dawn, “silence brooding like a gentle spirit / O’er all the still and pulseless world.” Off in the darkness I saw a huge silhouette lumbering among the trees—that was Otis, who seemed well on the way to becoming a nocturnal Giraffe. Perhaps he especially enjoyed the lonely hours of the morning. Or perhaps he couldn’t sleep any better than the rest of us.
I looked into the darkness for a good long while. Then I went indoors, and crept into bed with Calyxa just as the sky was lightening, and curled into the warmth of her sleeping body.
* The cells were installed during the reign of the very first Comstock, and had been used by every Comstock since, including Julian: Julian’s uncle Deklan, since his deposition, had been languishing in that same internal prison.
* Much to Calyxa’s disappointment and disgust.
† In July of 2175 a rebellion among indentured laborers at an Ohio broad-silk mill had spread to neighboring ribbon factories and dye shops. Over one hundred men died in the resulting siege.
* To be fair, many of these same individuals defied expectations in matters of Masculine and Feminine Deportment even when fully sober. It’s a common failing among theater people, I have found.
* The former President, not the Giraffe which was named after him.
* I asked Julian whether this was about the False Tribulation, but Julian said no; On the Beach had been produced nearly a century before the End of Oil. The events it dramatized must have been purely local in nature, or purely imaginary.
8
Less than a month passed between the night of the Wrap Party, which marked the end of the filming and editing of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, and its debut in a plush Broadway theater. A short time by ordinary reckoning; but it was a dire eternity in Julian’s reign as President.
Sam Godwin, who maintained close contact with the military, had taken on the thankless duty of conveying bad news to Julian—a role he was forced to play increasingly often. It was Sam who told Julian that the Army of the Californias had been met with fierce re sis tance by ecclesiastical forces at Colorado Springs. It was Sam who told him how the Rocky Mountain Division of that Army had rebelled, and swung its support from the Executive Power to the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. It was Sam (and I envied him this task least of all) who was obliged to tell Julian that, after extensive but ineffectual shelling and burning, Army commanders had worked out a truce with the Dominion Council and declared a unilateral cease-fire—all in violation of Julian’s direct orders.
Sam emerged from that session ashen-faced and shaking his head. “At times, Adam,” he confided in me, “I don’t know whether Julian even understands what I say to him. He acts as if these reverses were inconsequential, or too distant to matter. Or else he storms and rages at me, as if I were the author of his defeats. Then he hides away in that Projection Room of his, mesmerizing himself with moving pictures.”
There was worse to come. A mere three days before the debut of Charles Darwin, news reached us that the joint leaders of the Army of the Laurentians had declared solidarity with their comrades in California and had raised the possibility of a march on New York for the purpose of unseating Julian Conqueror. The name of Admiral Fairfield (who had been so successful at sea) was mooted as a possible successor. That might have been the keenest cut of all, for Julian admired the Admiral, and they had got along well during the Goose Bay Campaign.
These small and large insurrections shook the foundations of his Presidency; but Julian continued to make plans for the Broadway opening of his film. Local churches had begun calling for a boycott of it, and it would be necessary to cordon the theater with Republican Guards to prevent riots. Nevertheless Julian invited us all to the premiere, and made sure the finest carriages were available, and told us to dress in our best clothes, and make a grand occasion of it; and we did so, because we loved him, and because we might not have another chance to pay him such an honor.