People spoke quite openly of who would be serving in the Other Man’s new regime, and what kind of posts they would hold.
The Favorite for the post of Godfather acted the fine gentleman: He urged calm, made dignified noises, and temporized. In the meantime, the gate guards had been bribed. Exiles poured into the city. The sentence of exile had been the merciful punishment of the late Godfather’s later years. Now it became clear that the Godfather had merely exported resentments to a future date. These exiles—those among them who survived—had become hard, weathered men. They knew what they had lost. They also knew what they had to regain.
So there were more clashes, this time with gangs of hardened cutthroats. The Favorite pulled up his stakes and fled in terror.
Julian spent that night explaining how to use electricity and virtuality to connect the soul of Man with the planet Venus.
There was a large crowd for his last hermetic ceremony, and not because it was such an interesting topic. People had fled to Julian’s refuge because the city was convulsed with fear.
It had always been said of the people of Selder that they would shed their own blood rather than lose one drop of water. Like many clichés, that was true. The smothered resentments of a long, peaceful reign were all exposed to the open air. That meant beatings, break-ins, and back-alley backstabbings.
The elections were held in conditions of desperate haste, because only one man was fit to restore order.
To his credit, the new Godfather took prompt action. He averted anarchy through the simple tactic of purging all his opponents.
Julian surrendered peaceably. He had rather imagined that he might have to. The grass that bent before the wind would stand upright again, he reasoned. The world was still scarred with the windblown wrecks of long-dead forests.
Prison was dark, damp, and dirty. The time in prison weighed heavily on a man’s soul. Julian had nothing to write with, nothing to read. He never felt the sun, or breathed any fresh air.
Julian’s best friends in the underground cell were small insects. Over a passage of ten centuries, cave insects had somehow found the many wet passages beneath the city. Most of these wild denizens were smaller than lice, pale, long-legged, and eyeless. Julian had never realized there were so many different breeds of them. The humble life sheltered within the earth had suffered much less than the life exposed to mankind on its surface.
At length—at great length—Julian had a prison visitor.
“You will forgive Us,” stated the Godfather, “for trying a philosopher’s well-known patience. There were certain disorders consequent on Our accession, and a great press of necessary public business. Word has reached Our ears, however, that you have been shouting and pleading with your jailers. Weeping and begging like a hysterical woman, they tell Us.”
“I’m not a well man now, your eminence. I cannot thrive without the vibrations of the sun, the stars, and planets.”
“Surely you didn’t imagine that We would ever forget a classmate.”
“No, sir.”
“They tell Us you have been requesting—no, sobbing and pleading—for some literary material,” said the Godfather. He nodded at his silent bodyguard, who passed a sheaf of manuscripts through the carved stone pillars of the cell. “You will find these documents of interest. These are the signed confessions of your fellow conspirators.”
Julian leafed through the warrants. “It’s good to see that my friends kept up their skills in calligraphy.”
“We took the liberty of paging through the archives of our predecessor, as well,” said the Godfather. He produced a set of older documents. “You will recognize the striking eloquence of these death sentences. You were in top form back then. These documents of state are so grandiloquent, so closely argued, and in such exquisite English. They killed certain members of my own family—but as legal court documents, they were second to none.”
Julian sighed. “I just couldn’t do that any longer.”
“You won’t have to do it,” the Godfather allowed. “You wrote such sustainable classics here that We won’t need any new death sentences. We can simply reuse your fine, sturdy documents, over and over.”
“It was my duty to write sentences,” said Julian. “Sentences are a necessity of statecraft. Let me formally express my remorse.”
“You express your remorse now,” remarked the Godfather. “At the time, you were taking great pride in your superb ability to compose a sentence.”
“I admit my misdeeds, sir. I am contrite.”
“More recently, you and your friends were plotting against Our election,” said the Godfather patiently. “As a further patent insult to Our dignity, you had yourself crowned as the ‘President of the United States.’ There are witnesses to that event.”
“That was a diversion,” said Julian. “That was part of a magic ceremony. To help me electrically reach the virtual image of the planet Venus.”
“Juli, have you become a heretic, or just a maniac? You should read the allegations in these confessions! They are fantastic. Your fellow conspirators say that you believe that men can still fly. That you conjured living phantoms in public. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“People talk,” said Julian. “In a cage, people will sing.”
“You dressed your slave as a golden goddess and you made people worship her.”
“That was her costume,” said Julian. “She enjoyed that. I think it was the only time I’ve ever seen her happy.”
“Juli, We are not your classmate any more. We have become your Godfather. It is unclear to Us what you thought you were gaining by this charade. In any case, that will go on no longer. Your cabal has been arrested. Your house, and all that eerie rubbish inside it, has been seized. In times this dark and troubled, We have no need for epicene displays. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now tell Us what We are supposed to do with you.”
“Let me go,” said Julian, sweating in the stony chill. “Release me, and I will sing your praises. Some day history will speak of you. You will want history to say something noble and decent about you.”
“That is a tempting offer,” mused the Godfather. “I would like history to say this of me: that I was an iron disciplinarian who scourged corruption, and struck his enemies with hammer blows. Can you arrange that?”
“I can teach rhetoric. Someone will say that for you, and they’ll need great skill.”
“I hate a subtle insult,” said the Godfather. “I can forgive an enemy soldier who flings a spear straight at me, but a thing like that is just vile.”
“I don’t want to die here in this stone cage!” screeched Julian. “I can write a much better groveling confession than these other wretches! A man of your insight knows that confessions are nothing but rhetoric! Of course they all chose to indict me! How could they not? They are men with families to consider, while I am foreign-born and I have no one! We’re all intelligent men! We all know that if someone must die, then I’m the best to die. I’m one against four! But surely you must know better!”
“Of course I know better,” said the Godfather. “You imagined that, as men of letters, you were free of the healthy atmosphere of general fear so fit for everyone else. That is not true. Men of letters have to obey Us, they have to serve Us loyally, and they have to know that their lives are forfeit. Just like everyone else.”
“ ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the hood,’ ” said Julian.
“You always had a fertile mind for an apposite quote. We are inclined to spare you.”
Light bloomed in the dampest corner of Julian’s mind. “Yes, of course, of course I should be spared! Why should I die? I never raised my hand against you. I never even raised my voice.”
“Like the others, you must write your full and complete confession. It will be read aloud to the assembled court. Then, a year in the field with the army will toughen you up. You’re much too timid to fight, but Our army needs its political observers. We need clearly written reports from the field. And the better my officers, the worse they seem to write!”