Robert Charles Wilson - Julian-A Christmas Story.pdf - Robert Charles Wilson - allforjesus2001

Julian: A Christmas Story

by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a story about Julian Comstock, better known as Julian the Agnostic or (after his

uncle) Julian Conqueror. But it is not about his conquests, such as they were, or his betrayals, or

about the War in Labrador, or Julian’s quarrels with the Church of the Dominion. I witnessed

many of those events—and will no doubt write about them, ultimately—but this narrative

concerns Julian when he was young, and I was young, and neither of us was famous.

In late October of 2172—an election year—Julian and I, along with his mentor Sam

Godwin, rode to the Tip east of the town of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and

Julian tutored me in one of his heresies.

It was a brisk, sunny day. There was a certain resolute promptness to the seasons in that

part of Athabaska, in those days. Our summers were long, languid, and hot. Spring and fall

were brief, mere custodial functions between the extremes of weather. Winters were short but

biting. Snow set in around the end of December, and the River Pine generally thawed by late

March.

Today might be the best we would get of autumn. It was a day we should have spent

under Sam Godwin’s tutelage, perhaps sparring, or target-shooting, or reading chapters from the

Dominion History of the Union. But Sam was not a heartless overseer, and the kindness of the

weather had suggested the possibility of an Outing, and so we had gone to the stables, where my

father worked, and drawn horses, and ridden out of the Estate with lunches of black bread and

salt ham in our back-satchels.

We rode east, away from the hills and the town. Julian and I rode ahead; Sam rode

behind, a watchful presence, his Pittsburgh rifle ready in the saddle holster at his side. There was

no immediate threat of trouble, but Sam Godwin believed in perpetual preparedness; if he had a

gospel, it was BE PREPARED; also, SHOOT FIRST; and probably, DAMN THE

CONSEQUENCES. Sam, who was old (nearly fifty), wore a dense brown beard stippled with

wiry white hairs, and was dressed in what remained presentable of his tan-and-green Army of the

Californias uniform, and a cloak to keep the wind off. He was like a father to Julian, Julian’s

own true father having performed a gallows dance some years before. Lately he had been more

vigilant than ever, for reasons he had not discussed, at least with me.

Julian was my age (seventeen), and we were approximately the same height, but there the

resemblance ended. Julian had been born an aristo; my family was of the leasing class. His skin

was clear and pale where mine was dark and lunar. (I was marked by the same Pox that took my

sister Flaxie to her grave in ’63.) His hair was long and almost femininely clean; mine was black

and wiry, cut to stubble by my mother with her sewing scissors, and I washed it once a week or

so—more often in summer, when the brook behind the cottage ran clean and cool. His clothes

were linen and, in places, silk, brass-buttoned, cut to fit; my shirt and pants were course hempen

cloth, sewn to a good approximation but obviously not the work of a New York tailor.

And yet we were friends, and had been friends for three years, since we met by chance in

the forested hills west of the Duncan and Crowley Estate, where we had gone to hunt, Julian with

his fine Porter & Earle cassette rifle and me with a simple muzzle-loader. We both loved books,

especially the boys’ books written in those days by an author named Charles Curtis Easton. * I

had been carrying a copy of Easton’s Against the Brazilians , illicitly borrowed from the Estate

library; Julian had recognized the title, but refrained from ratting on me, since he loved the book

as much as I did and longed to discuss it with a fellow enthusiast (of which there were precious

few among his aristo relations)—in short, he did me an unbegged favor, and we became fast

friends despite our differences.

In those early days I had not known how fond he was of blasphemy. But I had learned

since, and it had not deterred me. Much.

* Whom I would meet when he was sixty years old, and I was a newcomer to the book trade—but

that's another story.

We had not set out with the specific aim of visiting the Tip; but at the nearest crossroad

Julian turned west, riding past cornfields and gourdfields already harvested and sun-whitened

split-rail fences on which dense blackberry gnarls had grown up. The air was cool but the sun

was fiercely bright. Julian and Sam wore broad-brimmed hats to protect their faces; I wore a

plain linen pakool hat, sweat-stained, rolled about my ears. Before long we passed the last rude

shacks of the indentured laborers, whose near-naked children gawked at us from the roadside,

and it became obvious we were going to the Tip, because where else on this road was there to

go?—unless we continued east for many hours, all the way to the ruins of the old towns, from the

days of the False Tribulation.

The Tip was located far from Williams Ford to prevent poaching and disorder. There

was a strict pecking order to the Tip. This is how it worked: professional scavengers hired by the

Estate brought their pickings from the ruined places to the Tip, which was a pine-fenced

enclosure (a sort of stockade) in a patch of grassland and prairie flowers. There the newly-

arrived goods were roughly sorted, and riders were dispatched to the Estate to make the high-

born aware of the latest acquisitions, and various aristos (or their trusted servants) would ride out

to claim the prime gleanings. The next day, the leasing class would be allowed to sort through

what was left; after that, if anything remained, indentured laborers could rummage among it, if

they calculated it worthwhile to make the journey.

Every prosperous town had a Tip; though in the east it was sometimes called a Till, a

Dump, or an Eebay.

Today we were fortunate: several wagonloads of scrounge had lately arrived, and riders

had not yet been sent to notify the Estate. The gate was manned by a Home Guard, who looked

at us suspiciously until Sam announced the name of Julian Comstock; then the guard briskly

stepped aside, and we went inside the enclosure.

Many of the wagons were still unloading, and a chubby Tipman, eager to show off his

bounty, hurried toward us as we dismounted and moored our horses. “Happy coincidence!” he

cried. “Gentlemen!” Addressing mostly Sam by this remark, with a cautious smile for Julian

and a disdainful sidelong glance at me. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Books,” Julian said promptly, before Sam or I could answer.

“Books! Ordinarily, I set aside books for the Dominion Conservator . . .”

“The boy is a Comstock,” Sam said. “I don’t suppose you mean to balk him.”

The Tipman reddened. “No, not at all . . . in fact we came across something in our

digging . . . a sort of library in miniature . . . I’ll show you, if you like.”

This was intriguing, especially to Julian, who beamed as if he had been invited to a

Christmas party. We followed the stout Tipman to a freshly-arrived canvasback wagon, from

which a laborer was tossing bundled piles into a stack beside a tent.

These twine-wrapped bales were books . . . old, tattered, and wholly free of the Dominion

Stamp of Approval. They must have been more than a century old; for although they were faded

they had obviously once been colorful and expensively printed, not made of stiff brown paper

like the Charles Curtis Easton books of modern times. They had not even rotted much. Their

smell, under the cleansing Athabaska sunlight, was inoffensive.

“Sam!” Julian whispered. He had already drawn his knife and was slicing through the

twine.

“Calm down,” suggested Sam, who was not an enthusiast like Julian.

“Oh, but— Sam! We should have brought a cart!”

“We can’t carry away armloads, Julian, nor would we ever have been allowed to. The

Dominion scholars will have all this. Though perhaps you can get away with a volume or two.”

The Tipman said, “These are from Lundsford.” Lundsford was the name of a ruined

town thirty or so miles to the southeast. The Tipman leaned toward Sam Godwin, who was his

own age, and said: “We thought Lundsford had been mined out a decade ago. But even a dry

well may freshen. One of my workers spotted a low place off the main excavations—a sort of

sink-hole : the recent rain had cut it through. Once a basement or warehouse of some kind. Oh,

sir, we found good china there, and glasswork, and many more books than this . . . most were

mildewed, but some had been protected under a kind of stiff oilcoth, and were lodged beneath a

partially-collapsed ceiling . . . there had been a fire, but they survived it . . .”

“Good work, Tipman,” Sam Godwin said.

“Thank you, sir! Perhaps you could remember me to the great men of the Estate?” And

he gave his name (which I have forgotten).

Julian had fallen to his knees amidst the compacted clay and rubble of the Tip, lifting up

each book in turn and examining it with wide eyes. I joined him in his exploration.

I had never much liked the Tip. It had always seemed to me a haunted place. And of

course it was haunted: that was its purpose, to house the revenants of the past, ghosts of the False

Tribulation startled out of their century-long slumber. Here was evidence of the best and worst

of the people who had inhabited the Years of Vice and Profligacy. Their fine things were very

fine, their glassware especially, and it was a straitened aristo indeed who did not possess antique

table-settings rescued from some ruin or other. Sometimes one might find silver utensils in

boxes, or useful tools, or coins. The coins were too plentiful to be worth much, individually, but

they could be worked into buttons or other adornments. One of the high-born back at the Estate

owned a saddle studded with copper pennies all from the year 2032. (I had occasionally been

enlisted to polish it.)

But here also was the trash and inexplicable detritus: “plastic,” gone brittle with sunlight

or soft with the juices of the earth; bits of metal blooming with rust; electronic devices blackened

by time and imbued with the sad inutility of a tensionless spring; engine parts, corroded; copper

wire rotten with verdigris; aluminum cans and steel barrels eaten through by the poisonous fluids

they had once contained—and so on, almost ad infinitum .

Here, too, were the in-between things, the curiosities, the ugly or pretty baubles, as

intriguing and as useless as seashells. (“Put down that rusty trumpet, Adam, you’ll cut your lip

and poison your blood!”—my mother, when we had gone to the Tip many years before I met

Julian. There had been no music in the trumpet anyway; its bell was bent and corroded through.)

More than that, though, there was the uneasy knowledge that these things, fine or corrupt,

had survived their makers—had proved more imperishable than flesh or spirit (for the souls of

the secular ancients were almost certainly not first in line for the Resurrection).

And yet, these books . . . they tempted; they proclaimed their seductions boldly. Some

were decorated with impossibly beautiful women in various degrees of undress. I had already

sacrificed my personal claim to virtue with certain young women at the Estate, whom I had

recklessly kissed; at the age of seventeen I considered myself a jade, or something like one; but

these images were so frank and impudent they made me blush and look away.

Julian simply ignored them, as he had always been invulnerable to the charms of women.

He preferred the larger and more densely-written material—he had already set aside a textbook

of BIOLOGY, spotted and discolored but largely intact. He found another volume almost as

large, and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Adam, try this—you might find it enlightening.”

I inspected it skeptically. The book was called A HISTORY OF MANKIND IN

SPACE.

Robert Charles Wilson - Julian-A Christmas Story.pdf

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