Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America Read online

  The Union grew in power and prosperity during the long and sunny reigns of the Pious. Our great rail network was perfected and enlarged, while the Estate System imposed legal regularity on the patchwork of land and indenture customs that prevailed prior to that time. Food was reasonably plentiful, the population began growing after the catastrophic mass deaths of the False Tribulation, the Pox took fewer children during those years, and international trade turned our ports into respectable cities harboring tens of thousands of inhabitants.

  That was the State of the Nation when Julian’s grandfather Emmanuel Comstock assumed the presidency. (Julian’s narrative, as I have said, was not as dry and abbreviated as mine, or he would never have held an audience. In fact his theatrical instincts served him admirably on these slow Sunday afternoons. He spoke in lilting cadences, adopted comic voices or postures to suit his subject, stroked his wispy beard to imitate the Pious Presidents, etc. And when he discussed the Comstock dynasty Julian’s impersonations became sharper and more cutting—though I doubt any of his listeners noticed.)

  Emmanuel Comstock, the first of the imperial Comstocks, was a brutal but far-sighted President who made it his business to modernize the Armies and bring them under the discipline of the Church of the Dominion. His work was successful, and before long the Nation possessed a fighting force to be reckoned with—a force Emmanuel Comstock wasted no time in exercising. The newly-reformed Army of the Laurentians attacked the Dutch north of the St. Lawrence, while Admiral Finch’s Red-and-White Fleet inflicted dramatic losses on the Mitteleuropans off Groswater Bay.

  During the course of these conflicts Emmanuel Comstock took for his wife a Senator’s daughter, and in the fifth and sixth year of his reign the union produced two sons: Deklan, the eldest, and Bryce Comstock. Emmanuel Comstock was determined that his sons would not be aristocratic idlers, so the brothers were trained from infancy as warriors and statesmen, and as soon as they reached maturity they were given military commissions in order to hone their command skills: Deklan was made a Major General in the Army of the Laurentians, and the younger Bryce received a comparable rank in the Army of the Californias.

  Different as the brothers were—the kindly, happily married Bryce and the brooding, solitary Deklan—both proved able-enough commanders. The first Comstock’s victories had pushed back the Mitteleuropans but had not driven them from North America: the Stadhouders, or Dutch Governors, were too firmly entrenched in the vast tracts of northeastern land they had ruled and exploited for so many years. But the Army of the Laurentians, under Deklan Comstock, captured and occupied all of Newfoundland, and the rail link between Sept-Iles and Schefferville passed into American hands.

  That was the famous Summer Campaign of 2160.* In its wake, core elements of the Army of the Laurentians marched to New York City for a Victory Parade. Soon afterward* Emmanuel Comstock died of a fall from his horse while hunting on the grounds of the Executive Palace; and Deklan, by the consent of a passive Senate, assumed the Presidency.

  (Here Julian called his listeners into a closer circle, so that his impersonation of Deklan Comstock’s shrill voice and petulant manner would not be overheard by passing officers. Sam was not present, or else he would have put a stop to the proceedings. Sam had already warned Julian against displays of Atheism or Sedition; but Julian saw no reason why his induction into the military should interfere with those interesting hobbies.)

  Deklan had been competent enough as a figurehead General, but he proved to be a jealous and suspicious President. He was especially jealous of his younger brother Bryce, whom he saw as a potential rival, and it was partly to put Bryce in harm’s way that Deklan conjured up the Isthmian War.† An American warship, the Maude, had exploded while passing out of the Panama Canal—probably due to a faulty boiler; but Deklan Comstock declared it an act of sabotage and blamed the canal’s Brazilian custodians. He wanted the Canal in American hands; and after a keenly-managed campaign the Army of the Californias—under the command of Bryce Comstock—gave it to him.

  Panama should have been a fine gem in Deklan’s diadem. But the younger Bryce had frustrated his brother’s dark hopes simply by surviving, and aroused further jealousy by the much-discussed brilliance of his military career.

  The Western armies could not march all the way to New York for their celebrations. Bryce was called back to that city alone, ostensibly to have the Order of Merit bestowed upon him. But no sooner had Bryce Comstock left the train than he was surrounded by Eastern soldiers and taken up on charges of treason.

  (I will not weary the reader with a description of that “trumped-up” charge, as Julian called it, or the fratricidal logic that transformed a victorious officer into an enemy of the Nation. Suffice to say that the trophy to be placed around the neck of Bryce Comstock went from Gold to Hemp, and that his true reward was a place at the throne of a Ruler more majestic than the reigning Commander in Chief.)

  And so matters had stood, Julian told his eager listeners, for the last decade—a stalemate in Labrador, a victory on the Isthmus of Panama, and Deklan Comstock growing ever more brooding and self-absorbed in the marbled corridors of the Presidential Palace. At least until last year. America’s acquisition of the Canal had alarmed the Mitteleuropan powers, who were forced to depend ever more heavily on the Northwest Passage for their trade into the Pacific, and they feared American dominance there. So they had fortified their remaining American possessions, enhanced their military and naval forces, and soon enough launched a massive counterattack against the Army of the Laurentians.

  “This is the war we are to fight?” asked Lymon Pugh, whose attention had been strained by Julian’s narrative.

  “That’s exactly the war we are to fight, and it isn’t going well for us. The Dutch are arrayed in force, we’ve already lost the railroad to Schefferville, and both Quebec City and Montreal are threatened by the enemy. The Army of the Laurentians took heavy casualties last summer, which is why the draft was doubled up.”

  “Sounds like we have the short end of the stick, then,” another soldier remarked.

  “Perhaps not,” said Julian, for he was not a defeatist, or a friend of the Dutch. “The enemy are well-provisioned, but their supply lines stretch all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and our Navy is making things hot for Dutch shipping. Their army is of a fixed number, while ours is growing. And,” Julian added, grinning broadly, “we’re Americans, and they are not, which makes all the difference.”

  There followed a cheer for the Union, and much chest-thumping, and the crowd of draftees went off bragging about how they would rout the enemy, and show the Dutch what American soldiers were truly made of. It was Lymon Pugh, lingering behind, who asked, “How do you know all these things, Julian Commongold? Are you some kind of scholar? You talk like one.”

  Julian deflected the question with a shrug. “I’m from New York City—I read the newspapers.”

  This put Lymon Pugh’s mind back on the subject of reading, and literacy in general, and he grew thoughtful as we broke for mess.

  Of course Julian’s tutorials on the state of the war did not escape the attention of the camp’s ranking officers for long. Word spread, and (according to Sam, who kept his ear to the ground) the Dominion men on the staff were unhappy with Julian for his editorializing, and wanted him to receive a reprimand. But the camp’s military commander vetoed that idea, for Julian was a promising soldier, and his blunt talk had braced the men more effectively than a dozen fire-breathing Sunday sermons.

  Sam was not bound by such scruples, and chastised Julian roundly for his loose talk—reminding him that in the long run notoriety might be as dangerous as combat—but Julian paid little attention.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Sam said to me after one of these confrontations. “It’s the Comstock in him.”

  “He’ll make a fine soldier, then,” I said.

  “Or a famous corpse,” said Sam.

  We were scheduled to be shipped east for the spring ca
mpaign; but before then, on another Sunday afternoon, Lymon Pugh approached me once again on the subject of reading and writing.

  “Thought perhaps I could learn all about it,” he said sheepishly. “Unless I left it too late. What about that, Adam Hazzard? Is it something only children can learn?”

  “No,” I said, for I considered myself, in this community, a sort of Evangelist of Literacy. My writing skills had been mooted about, and many of the men came to me to help them read or compose letters. “Anyone can learn it at any time. It’s not especially difficult.”

  “Could I learn, then?”

  “I expect you could.”

  “And will you teach me?”

  I was feeling magnanimous—the day was bright, the air had a delicate warmth, and a general languor had descended over the camp (along with the swampy smell of the thawing prairie and an unfortunate breeze from the latrines). I reclined on my cot with my boots off and my toes exposed to the air. Lymon Pugh sat on the cot adjoining, where he greased his rifle in a distracted way, his scarred hands moving almost of their own volition. A charitable act did not seem out of order. “But I can’t do it in one lesson, mind. We’ll have to begin from first principles.”

  “I expect we’ll have plenty of time, if neither of us is killed in the war. You can give it to me piecemeal, Adam.”

  “In that case we’ll begin with the letters of the Alphabet. The Alphabet is a collection of all the letters there are, and once you learn them no unexpected letters will come along to confuse you.”

  “How many of these letters are there?”

  “Twenty-six altogether.”

  He looked crestfallen. “That’s a large number.”

  “It only seems so. Here, I’ll write them out for you, and you can keep this paper and study it.” I took a page from my notebook and copied down all the letters in their large and small incarnations, thus:

  Aa—Bb—Cc—(etc.)

  “Seems like you’re wrong on the count,” Lymon Pugh observed when I had finished. “That’s at least fifty, I estimate.”

  “No, only twenty-six, but each one comes in a greater or lesser variety, the larger being called a capital letter.”

  He studied the page uncomprehendingly. “Maybe we should call this off … it don’t seem like anything I could ever commit to memory.”

  “You underestimate yourself. Suppose, while you were wandering east from the Willamette Valley, you came upon a village with just twenty-six people in it, and decided to stay there. You’d learn the names of the whole tribe soon enough, wouldn’t you? And many other things about them.”

  “People aren’t scratches on a page, though. People walk about, and talk, and such.”

  “Letters may not walk about, but they do talk, for each one represents a sound. Look, we don’t have to introduce you to all twenty-six at once. That would make you like a stranger at a crowded social event, which is always an uneasy experience. Take the first three by themselves, as if they were sitting around a campfire and invited you to join them.”

  “This is fanciful.”

  “Bear with me. Here is A, and his companion the lesser a,” and I pronounced the sound of the letter and its variations, and instructed Lymon Pugh to repeat them, and to associate the sounds with the letter’s shape, the way he might connect a face with a name. When he had done this satisfactorily we proceeded to blunt, simple Bb and the more elusive and chameleonic Cc. By the time he mastered these three letters nearly an hour had passed, and it seemed to me that Lymon Pugh, like a sponge, had absorbed all the knowledge he had room for at the moment, and any more of it would simply leak out around the edges.

  He agreed to defer further instruction until the next lesson—perhaps the following Sunday—but observed, “These are only sounds, and I don’t see how they connect to writing or reading.”

  “You can stack and arrange them to make words, ultimately. But don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  “Is there a word I might make with just these three?”

  The only one I could think of was the word CAB, so I wrote that out for him, and he was delighted by it. “Damn if my uncle didn’t drive a cab in Portland some years back, and it was a fine rig, with a four-horse team. I wish I could have written out that word for him! He would have thought I was a Dominion scholar, or an Aristo in disguise.”

  “Practice the letters in your spare time,” I said, giving him a blank page to work with, and an extra pencil I had stolen from the Quartermaster’s tent last week previously (because I like to keep a stock of pencils on hand: they’re perishable, and often hard to come by). “You can write CAB,” I said, and showed him, “or cab—they mean the same—but you should practice both.”

  “I will,” he said, and after a moment’s pondering added, “But this is too generous, Adam Hazzard. I ought to pay you for all this work.”

  I was happy enough that he had got out of the habit of striking me with his fists, and that was all the payment I wished for; but to smooth the awkwardness I said, “There must be many things you know about that I don’t. Someday you can teach me one or two of them.”

  He frowned over this idea, taking up his rifle again and finishing its assembly. Then, as he set aside the last oiled rag, he brightened. “I guess I can tell you how to make a fine Knocker.”

  “That might be a good example, since I don’t know what a Knocker is.”

  “Oh, well,” (warming to his subject), “I guess anyone can make a crude sort of Knocker—you’ve probably done it yourself, though maybe they call it by some other name in Athabaska. A Knocker, Adam, you know: the thing you use when you want to knock someone about the head.”

  “Perhaps if you described it.”

  “Put a stone in the end of a sock and you have one. Swing it in a circle and bring it down on the skull of your enemy: bang!”

  I was startled by his violent exclamation. “Do you need to do this—very often?”

  “Did in the Valley. Most of us boys did, if we wanted to make any money outside of the slaughterhouse, by taking it from drunks, for instance, or when we set to fighting each other. But a stone in a sock is a poor sort of Knocker, the very worst.”

  Here Lymon Pugh launched into an exposition of the way to make a superior Knocker, of which the owner might justly be proud. You begin, he said, by cracking a chicken egg, “only not in the usual style: you must crack it very fine at the narrow end, to make a small hole, and then empty out the soft parts and let the shell dry. Then you melt some lead—an old candlestick, a handful of bullets, or some such thing. Bury the shell up to its hole in sand and pour the molten lead inside. You let it settle overnight; then you dig it out and peel away the shell, and what’s inside is a good smooth heavy slug in the shape of an egg. Then you make a sling for it—an old sock won’t do for a respectable man—of pressed leather or strong hemp, and tie it with a leather thatch, and stitch on a bead or a brass button if you’re feeling artistic. The whole assembly tucks into your pocket real neat—it’s not bulky—but a Knocker like that will crack a man’s head just like an egg.”

  “Thus bringing the process full circle,” I said, slightly appalled.

  “How’s that?”

  “Never mind. That’s a fine piece of knowledge, Lymon, and I thank you for it, and I consider myself paid in full, though I don’t have any use for a Knocker right at the moment.”

  “That’s all right,” said Lymon Pugh, grinning. “I don’t have anyone to write to, either, except maybe the grocer, or any books to read. But you never know when the Alphabet might come in handy.”

  “Or a Knocker,” I said; and then the mess call sounded.

  It must not be assumed that our adjustment to the military life was easily made. Many were the nights in that camp on the prairie when I fell asleep with tears trembling in my eyes, thinking of what seemed like a carefree existence back in Williams Ford. If I had been scorned by other boys, or treated roughly in the stables, or nipped by a brood mare now and then, those memories rec
eded, so that all my previous life appeared as one lazy summer on the banks of the River Pine, where squirrels fell from the trees like tropical fruit, and I was forever a-doze in a sun-dappled glade, with a book open on my chest, dreaming of pleasanter wars than this one.

  My thoughts turned, too, to the gentler sex, who were in scant supply at the moment, and I wondered if I would ever again be allowed to gaze on a smiling face or examine a pair of feminine eyes from close proximity. The male urge was not dormant in me, and I was afraid I might grow as lonely and desperate as some of my fellow soldiers, who dispelled their lusts in obscene and indescribable pursuits. A copy of Acts Condemned by Leviticus circulated furtively among the men, and I confess I glanced at it once or twice, out of curiosity.

  But in general we were kept too busy to feel sorry for ourselves. For many of these men the Army was a marked improvement on the lives they used to live, and had its compensations in regular meals and the small but dependable pay.

  We were paid for the first time shortly before we were due to ship east, where there might be an opportunity to spend some of our geld, especially if we were stationed near Montreal or Quebec—or so the speculation ran. In any case it was a novelty to hold cash in our hands. Many of the soldiers promptly sewed the scrip and coin into secret pockets in their ditty-bags, or hid it in their clothing or in makeshift belts tied about their waists. But because the money was a new thing to me—all I had seen of money in Williams Ford was lease-chits and antique pennies—I repaired right away to the dormitory tent to handle and examine it, where Sam and Julian joined me.

  “We’re off in the morning,” Sam said as he came in, “for better or worse. Celebrating Easter in Montreal I think. And then battle—the real thing.… What are you staring at so steadfastly, Adam Hazzard?”

  “These coins.”