Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

  When we filed into the dining hall we discovered that our seats at the long tables had been assigned to us, and marked with small ornaments bearing our names. Calyxa and I sat together, but nowhere near the other members of our party. Directly across from us—an unfortunate coincidence—was Nelson Wieland, the brutal industrialist who had made such a poor impression on Calyxa outside the stables. Seated beside him was a similarly aged gentleman in silk and wool, introduced to us as Mr. Billy Palumbo. It emerged in conversation over the soup course that Mr. Palumbo was an agriculturalist. He owned several vast domains in upper New York State, where his indentured people grew pea-beans and corn for the city market.

  Mr. Wieland criticized the gourd soup, which he claimed was too thick.

  “Seems all right to me,” Mr. Palumbo rejoined. “I like a substantial broth. Do you care for it at all, Mrs. Hazzard?”

  “I suppose it’s fine,” Calyxa said in an indifferent tone.

  “More than fine,” I added. “I didn’t know a common gourd could be made so palatable, or even harvested this time of year.”

  “I’ve tasted better,” said Wieland.

  The discussion continued in this culinary vein throughout the meal. Boiled onions were served—undercooked, or over; we debated them. Medallions of lamb—Palumbo considered the cut too rare. Potatoes: picked young. Coffee, too strong for Mr. Wieland’s constitution. And so on.

  By the time dessert was served—wintergreen ice-cream, a novelty to me—Calyxa seemed prepared to throw her portion across the table, if Palumbo and Wieland didn’t leave off the topic of food. Instead she lobbed a different kind of missile. “Do your indentured people eat this well, Mr. Palumbo?” she asked abruptly.

  The question took Palumbo by surprise. “Well, hardly,” he said. He smiled. “Imagine serving them ice-cream! They’d soon grow too stout to work.”*

  “Or perhaps they might work harder, if they had such a thing to look forward to at the end of the day.”

  “I doubt it very much. Are you a radical, Mrs. Hazzard?”

  “I don’t call myself that.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Compassion is a fine thing, but dangerous when it’s misplaced. What I’ve learned in many years of overseeing the indentured is that they have to be treated very strictly at all times. They mistake kindness for weakness. And if they see a weakness in an Owner they’ll take advantage of it. They’re notorious for their laziness, and inventive in finding ways to pursue it.”

  “I agree,” Mr. Wieland put in. “For instance, that servant you saw me discipline earlier tonight. ‘Only a broken wheel,’ you might think. But let it slide, and tomorrow there would be two broken wheels, or a dozen.”

  “Yes, that’s the logic of it,” Palumbo said.

  “Logic,” Calyxa said, “if you carry it to its conclusion, might imply that men working against their will are not the most efficient laborers.”

  “Mrs. Hazzard! Good grief!” exclaimed Palumbo. “If the indentured are sullen, it’s only because they fail to appreciate their own good fortune. Have you seen the popular film Eula’s Choice?”

  “Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

  “It explains the origins of the indenture system very succinctly. A bargain was struck sometime around the end of the False Tribulation, and the same terms obtain today.”

  “You believe in the theory of Heritable Debt, Mr. Palumbo?”

  “‘Heritable Debt’ is the radical’s term for it. You ought to be more careful in your reading, Mrs. Hazzard.”

  “It’s a question of property,” Wieland interjected.

  “Yes,” Calyxa said, “for the indentured don’t have any—in fact they are property.”

  “Not at all. You defame the people you mean to defend. Of course the indentured have property. They own their bodies, their skills, if any, and their capacity for labor. If they don’t seem to own these things, it’s only because the commodity has already been sold. It happened as in the film Mr. Palumbo mentions. Refugees from the Fall of the Cities traded the only goods they possessed—their hands, their hearts, and their votes—for food and shelter in a difficult time.”

  “A person ought not to be able to sell himself,” Calyxa said, “much less his vote.”

  “If a person owns himself then he must be able to sell himself. Else what meaning does property have? As for the vote, he isn’t deprived of it—it still exists—he has only signed it over to his landed employer, who votes it for him.”

  “Yes, so the Owners can control that sorry excuse for a Senate—”

  This was perhaps too much to say. Nearby heads turned toward us, and Calyxa blushed and lowered her voice. “I mean, these are opinions that I have read. In any case, the bargain you describe was made more than a century ago, if it was made at all. Nowadays people are born into indenture.”

  “A debt is a debt, Mrs. Hazzard. The commitment doesn’t vanish simply because a man has had the bad luck to die. If a man’s possessions pass by right to his survivors, so do his obligations. What have you been reading that left you laboring under such misapprehensions?”

  “A man named … oh I think Parmentier,” Calyxa said, pretending innocence.

  “Parmentier! That European terrorist! Good God, Mrs. Hazzard, you do need some direction in your studies!” Wieland cast an accusing glance at me.

  “I have recommended the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton,” I said.

  “The spread of literacy is the problem here,” said Palumbo. “Oh, I’m all in favor of a sensible degree of literacy—as you must be, Mr. Hazzard, given your career as a journalist. But it has an infectious tendency. It spreads, and discontent spreads along with it. Admit one literate man to a coffle and he’ll teach the others the skill; and what they read won’t be Dominion-approved works, but pornography, or the lowest kind of cheap publications, or fomentive political tracts. Parmentier! Why, Mrs. Hazzard, just a week ago I purchased a string of three hundred men from a planter in Utica, at what appeared to be a bargain price. I kept them apart from my other stock for a time, a sort of quarantine period, and I’m glad I did, for it turned out reading was endemic among them, and Parmentierist pamphlets were circulating freely. That kind of thing can ruin an entire Estate, if it flourishes unchecked.”

  Calyxa didn’t ask what Mr. Palumbo had done to check the flourishing of literacy among his “stock,” perhaps because she feared the answer. But her face betrayed her feelings. She tensed, and I worried that she was about to fling some new accusation across the table, or perhaps a fork. It was at this moment, fortunately, that the dessert plates were cleared away.

  Intoxicating drinks circulated freely after the meal, including such expensive abominations as Champagne and Red Wine. I did not partake, though the Eupatridians went at it like horses at a trough.

  Deklan Comstock briefly appeared from another indoor balcony—he preferred a commanding height, Julian said—and invited us to step into the ballroom adjoining, where the band would play patriotic tunes. We followed at the President’s bidding. The music struck up at once, and some of the Aristos, well lubricated with fiery fluids, began to dance. I didn’t dance, and Calyxa didn’t want to; so we looked for genial company instead, well distant from Mr. Wieland and Mr. Palumbo.

  We found company—or it found us—but it was not congenial, in the long run.

  “Mr. Hazzard,” said a booming voice.

  I turned, and saw a man in clerical garb.

  I gathered he was some high functionary of the Dominion, for he wore a broad-rimmed felt hat with silver trimming, a sober black jacket, and a formal cotton shirt on which the legend John 3:16 was stitched in golden thread. I didn’t recognize his face, which was florid and round. He carried a glass in his hand, and the glass was half-filled with an amber fluid, and his breath smelled like the copper-coil stills Ben Kreel used to discover and destroy in the indentured men’s quarters back in Williams Ford. His eyes glittered with intrigue or drink.

  “You k
now me, but I don’t know you,” I said.

  “On the contrary, I don’t know you at all, but I’ve read your pamphlet on the subject of Julian Comstock, and someone was kind enough to point you out to me.” He extended the hand which was not holding a drink. “My name is Simon Hollings-head, and I’m a Deacon of the Diocese of Colorado Springs.”

  He said that as if it was a trivial thing. It wasn’t. The simple title belied a powerful position in the Dominion hierarchy. In fact the only clergymen more elevated than the Deacons of Colorado Springs were the seventy members of the Dominion High Council itself.

  Pastor Hollingshead’s hand was hot and moist, and I let go of it as soon as I could do so without offending him.

  “What brings you to the east?” Calyxa asked warily.

  “Ecclesiastical duties, Mrs. Hazzard—nothing you would understand.”

  “On the contrary, it sounds fascinating.”

  “Well, I can’t speak as freely as I would like. But the eastern cities have to be taken in hand from time to time. They tend to drift away from orthodoxy, left to their own devices. Unaffiliated Churches spring up like fungal growths. The mixing of classes and nationalities has a well-known degenerative influence.”

  “Perhaps the Easterners drink too freely,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “‘Wine that gladdens the heart of man,’” quoted the Deacon, though it appeared to be something more powerful than wine in his glass.* “It’s sacred doctrine I’ve come to protect, not personal sobriety. Drinking isn’t a sin, though drunkenness is. Do I seem drunk to you, Mr. Hazzard?”

  “No, sir, not noticeably. What sacred doctrines are in danger?”

  “The ones that prohibit laxness in administering a flock. Eastern clergy will overlook the damnedest things, pardon me. Lubriciousness, licentiousness, lust—”

  “The alliterative sins,” Calyxa said quietly.

  “But enough of my problems. I meant only to congratulate you on your history of Julian Comstock’s military adventures.”

  I thanked him kindly, and pretended to be modest.

  “Young people have very little in the way of uplifting literature available to them. Your work is exemplary, Mr. Hazzard. I see it hasn’t yet received the Dominion Stamp. But that can be changed.”

  It was a generous offer, which might result in an increase of sales, and for that reason I thought we shouldn’t offend Deacon Hollingshead unnecessarily. Calyxa, however, was in a sharp mood, and unimpressed with Hollingshead’s ecclesiastical rank and powers.

  “Colorado Springs is a big town,” she said. “Doesn’t it have problems of its own you could be looking after?”

  “Surely it does! Corruption can creep in anywhere. Colorado Springs is the very heart and soul of the Dominion, but you’re right, Mrs. Hazzard, vice breeds there as well as anywhere else. Even in my own family—”

  He hesitated then, as if unsure whether he ought to proceed. Perhaps the liquor had made him distrust his tongue. To my dismay, Calyxa wouldn’t let the matter drop. “Vice, in a Deacon’s family?”

  “My own daughter has been a victim of it.” He lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t ordinarily discuss this. But you seem to be a thoughtful young woman. You don’t bare your arms like so many of the ladies present, nor cover your skin with ugly vaccination marks.”

  “My modesty is well-known,” Calyxa said, though she had lobbied to wear just such a sleeveless costume—Mrs. Comstock had overruled her.

  “Then I won’t offend you by mentioning, um—”

  “Unpleasant vices are offensive to me, Deacon Hollingshead, but the words describing them are not. How can we eradicate a problem unless we’re allowed to name it?”

  She was baiting him; but Hollingshead was too virtuous or drunk to understand. “Homosexuality,” he whispered. “Do you know that word, Mrs. Hazzard?”

  “The rumor of such behavior has occasionally reached my ears. Is your daughter a—?”

  “God forbid! No, Marcy is a model child. She’s twenty-one now. But because she has yet to marry, she drew the attention of a league of degenerate women.”

  “In Colorado Springs!”

  “Yes! Such a thing exists! And it continues to exist, despite all my efforts to eradicate it.”

  “What efforts have you made?”

  “Both the Municipal Police and the investigatory arm of the Dominion have been put on the case. Needless to say, I don’t let Marcy go anywhere unobserved. There are eyes on her at all times, though she doesn’t know it.”

  “Is it really a wise thing to spy on your own daughter?”

  “Certainly, if it protects her.”

  “Does it protect her?”

  “Several times it has saved her from absolute ruin. Marcy seems hardly able to leave the house without wandering by accident into some depraved tavern or other. Naturally, when we discover such establishments we shut them down. More than one degenerate woman has attempted to make Marcy a special friend. Those women were arrested and interrogated.”

  “Interrogated!—why?”

  “Because there’s more than coincidence at work,” the bibulous Deacon said. “Clearly, some group of deviants has targeted my daughter. We interrogated these women in order to find out the connection between them.”

  “Has the effort succeeded?”

  “Unfortunately no. Even under extreme duress, none of these women will admit that their interest in Marcy was planned in advance, and they deny all knowledge of any conspiracy.”

  “Interrogations aren’t generally so fruitless, I take it,” said Calyxa, and I could tell by the reddening of her face that she didn’t approve of the Deacon’s enthusiastic approach to the knotty issues of vice and torture.

  “No, they’re not. Our investigators are skilled at extracting information from the unwilling—the Dominion trains them in it.”

  “How do you explain the failure in this case, then?”

  “Vice has unsuspected depths and profundities—it hides by instinct from the light,” the Deacon said grimly.

  “And it occurs so close to home,” Calyxa said, adding, in a low tone, “On aurait peut-étre dû torturer votre fille, aussi.”

  I expected Deacon Hollingshead to ignore this incomprehensible remark. He did not. Instead he drew himself up in a rigid posture. His features hardened abruptly.

  “Je ne suis ni idiot ni inculte, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said. “Si vous vous moquez de moi, je me verrai dans l’obligation de lancer un mandat d’arrét contre vous.”

  I didn’t know what this exchange meant, but Calyxa paled and took a step backward.

  Hollingshead faced me. His put his smile back on, though it seemed forced. “I congratulate you again on your success, Mr. Hazzard. Your work does you credit. You have a fine career ahead of you. I hope nothing interferes with it.” He took a noisy sip from his glass and walked away.

  I don’t mean to leave the reader with the impression that all the Eupatridians we met at the Presidential Reception were boors or tyrants. Many, perhaps most, were entirely pleasant, taken as individuals. Several of the men were yachtsmen, and I enjoyed listening to their spirited discourse on nautical subjects, though I couldn’t reef a mainsail if my life depended on it.

  Mrs. Comstock knew a number of the wives. Many of them were astonished to see her here, so long after the death of her husband; but they were accustomed to the caprices of Presidential favor and quickly accepted her back into their ranks.

  Sam spent his time with the military contingent, including a handful of notable Generals and Major Generals. I suppose Sam was gauging their attitude toward the Commander in Chief, or trying to pick up clues about the President’s intentions toward Julian. But all that was beyond my ken. Julian himself was deep in conversation with what he described to me as a genuine Philosopher: a Professor of Cosmology from the newly-reformed New York University. This man had many interesting theories, Julian said, about the Speed of Light, and the Origin of Stars, and other such refined subjects. But he was
under the thumb of the Dominion, and could not discourse as freely as he might have liked. Nevertheless the man had enjoyed some access to the Dominion Archives, and hinted at the artistic and scientific treasures concealed there.

  The general hilarity occasioned by the drinking of Grape Wine, etc., soon reached fresh heights. The musical band had adjourned for a short while—they were out behind the stables, Calyxa suggested, smoking hempen cigarettes—but they returned in relatively good order, and better spirits, just as Deklan Comstock made a third appearance on one of his marbled balconies.

  This time the President called out recognition to the most elevated members of the crowd, including the Speaker of the Senate, Deacon Hollingshead, several prominent Landowners, the Surgeon General, the Chinese and Nipponese Ambassadors (who had been eyeing each other uneasily from opposite ends of the room), and other dignitaries. Then he smiled his unwholesome smile and said, “Also present, and home from his adventures defending the Union in Labrador, is my beloved nephew, Julian Comstock, as well as his celebrated Scribe, Mr. Adam Hazzard, and his former tutor, Sam Godwin.”

  Hearing my name pronounced by this man was unnerving, and caused a shiver to rush up my spine.

  “Mr. Hazzard,” the President continued, “has a very great and subtle literary talent, and I’ve recently learned that his wife is talented as well. Mrs. Hazzard is a singer, and it occurs to me to wonder whether she might favor us with a ballad or such, now that the band is warmed up. Mrs. Hazzard!” He feigned shielding his eyes against the light. “Mrs. Hazzard, are you willing to entertain these ladies and gentlemen?”

  Calyxa’s jaw was grimly set—clearly this was Deklan Comstock’s attempt to humiliate her, and indirectly Julian, by exposing her as a cabaret singer—but at the same time it was an invitation she dared not refuse. “Hold my drink, Adam,” she said flatly;* then she climbed up onto the bandstand where the musicians were arrayed.

  This turn of events had taken the bandleader by surprise as well. He looked at her blankly, perhaps expecting her to call out a familiar song-title—Where the Sauquoit Meets the Mohawk, or some respectable piece like that.