JULIAN COMSTOCK

BY ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

from Tom Doherty Associates

A Hidden Place

Darwinia

Bios

The Perseids and Other Stories

The Chronoliths

Blind Lake

Spin

Axis

Julian Comstock

JULIAN

C OMSTOCK

Robert Charles Wilson

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed

in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

JULIAN COMSTOCK: A STORY OF 22ND-CENTURY AMERICA

Copyright © 2009 by Robert Charles Wilson

All rights reserved.

Edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Robert Charles, 1953–

Julian Comstock: a story of 22nd-century America / Robert Charles Wilson.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1971-5

ISBN-10: 0-7653-1971-3

1. United States—Fiction.   2. Political fiction.   I. Title.

PR9199.3.W4987J85   2009

813’.54—dc22

2008053400

First Edition: June 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

To Mr. William Taylor Adams of Massachusetts,

who might not have approved of it,

this book

is nevertheless respectfully and gratefully dedicated.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

—JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

Look not for roses in Attalus his garden, or wholesome flowers in a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce any one bad, but some others are the worse for him, tempt not contagion by proximity, and hazard not thyself in the shadow of corruption.

—SIR THOMAS BROWNE

Crowns, generally speaking, have thorns.

—ARTHUR E. HERTZLER

JULIAN COMSTOCK

PROLOGUE

I mean to set down here the story of the life and adventures of Julian Comstock, better known as Julian the Agnostic or (after his uncle) Julian Conqueror.

Readers familiar with the name will naturally expect scenes of blood and betrayal, including the War in Labrador and Julian’s run-in with the Church of the Dominion. I witnessed all those events firsthand, and at closer proximity than I might have liked, and they are all described in the five “Acts” (as I call them) that follow. In the company of Julian Comstock I traveled from the pine-bark Eden in which I was born all the way to Mascouche, Lake Melville, Manhattan, and stranger places; I saw men and governments rise and fall; and I woke many a morning with death staring me in the face. Some of the memories I mean to set down aren’t pleasant ones, or flattering, and I tremble a little at the prospect of reliving them, but I intend to spare no one—we were what we were, and we became what we became, and the facts will ennoble or demean us, as the reader chooses to see it.

But I begin the story the way it began for me—in a town in the boreal west, when Julian was young, and I was young, and neither of us was famous.

ACT ONE

A PINE-BARK EDEN;

or,

THE CARIBOU-HORN TRAIN

CHRISTMAS, 2172

And the same fires, which were kindled for Heretics, will serve for the destruction of Philosophers.

—HUME, a Philosopher

1

In October of 2172—the year the Election show came to town—Julian Comstock and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to the Tip east of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one of his heresies.

There was a certain resolute promptness to the seasons in Athabaska in those days. Summers were long and hot, December brought snow and sudden freezes, and most years the River Pine ran freely by the first of March. Spring and fall were mere custodial functions, by comparison. Today might be the best we would get of autumn—the air brisk but not cold, the long sunlight unhindered by any cloud. It was a day we ought to have spent under Sam Godwin’s tutelage, reading chapters from The Dominion History of the Union or Otis’s War and How to Conduct It. But Sam wasn’t a heartless overseer, and the gentle weather suggested the possibility of an outing. So we went to the stables where my father worked, and drew horses, and rode out of the Estate with lunches of black bread and salt ham in our back-satchels.

At first we headed south along the Wire Road, away from the hills and the town. Julian and I rode ahead while Sam paced his mount behind us, his Pittsburgh rifle in the saddle holster at his side. There was no perceptible threat or danger, but Sam Godwin believed in preparedness—if he had a gospel, it was BE PREPARED; also, SHOOT FIRST; and probably, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES. Sam, who was nearly fifty winters old, wore a dense brown beard stippled with white hairs, and was dressed in what remained presentable of his Army of the Californias uniform. Sam was nearly a father to Julian, Julian’s own true father having performed a gallows dance some years before, and lately Sam had been more vigilant than ever, for reasons he hadn’t discussed, at least with me.