The unpleasant trophies remained there most of a week, rotting. Small boys gathered every day to toss pebbles at them, until the ghastly ornaments at last came loose from their spikes and tumbled back onto the Palace grounds.

Julian wouldn’t speak of the beheadings, saying only that justice had been done and that the event was finished. I hoped he had not ordered the executions, but had only sanctioned them—though that was bad enough. I did not, of course, feel any sympathy for Julian’s uncle or the anonymous assassin, since the former had committed many murders and the latter had attempted at least one. But the cutting off of their heads without benefit of trial did not seem to me entirely civilized; and I could not help thinking that the public display of their remains served no better purpose than to make Julian appear brutal and imperious.

During that same week, in another imperious act, Julian dismissed every serving member of the Republican Guard—some five hundred altogether—and replaced them with members of the Army of the Laurentians, selected by Julian personally from a list of those who had fought by his side at Mascouche, Chicoutimi, and Goose Bay. Many of these men were my comrades as well, and it was startling to walk down the halls of the Executive Palace and find myself greeted not with the malign stares and suspicion to which I had become accustomed, but by hearty hails from old friends and acquaintances.

That feeling was compounded one Friday evening when I went to join Julian and Magnus Stepney to plan out the next week’s efforts on Charles Darwin. The new Captain of the Republican Guards, whom I had not met, was standing watch over the Library Wing when I turned a corner in one of that building’s long halls and nearly collided with him.

“Watch out,” the new man cried, “I’m not a door you can swing wide and walk through—state your business, mister—but—be damned if it isn’t Adam Hazzard! Adam, you bookworm! I’ll shake your hand or know why not!”

He did shake my hand, and it was a bruising experience, for the new Captain of the Guard was Mr. Lymon Pugh.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so glad to see him, but at that moment he seemed like an envoy from a simpler and easier world. I told him I hadn’t expected to meet him again, and that I hoped the Palace was a good place in which to find himself employed.

“Better than a slaughterhouse,” he said. “And you! Last time I saw you, Adam, you had just married that tavern singer from the Thirsty Boot.”

“I did, and we have a daughter now—I’ll introduce you!”

“You wrote a book, too, somebody told me.”

“A pamphlet about ‘Captain Commongold,’ and a novel which is selling adequately well; and I’ve met Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, and worked beside him. But you must have accomplished things just as significant!”

He shrugged. “I lived to my present age without dying,” he said. “That’s enough to boast about, by my lights.”

Calyxa kept her distance from The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, as well as from Julian himself. Having supplied the score and lyrics, she felt no need to involve herself in the minutiae of movie-making, especially during a time when she was instructing Flaxie in the fundamentals of eating, and standing upright, and such useful skills as that.

She continued to meet with Parmentierist friends from the city, however, and Mrs. Comstock (or Mrs. Godwin, as I could not get accustomed to calling her) pursued certain of her contacts among the lesser Eupatridians. More importantly, the two women consulted one another and formulated plans to deal with any crisis that might arise out of Julian’s political situation.

“Do you know very much about Mediterranean France?” Calyxa asked me with a certain affected casualness, one September night as we lay in bed.

“Only that Mitteleuropa claims it as a Territory, while it insists it’s an Independent Republic.”

“The weather there is very clement, and Mediterranean France has cordial relations with other parts of the world.”

“I expect that’s so … what about it?”

“Nothing at all, except that we may have to live there one day.”

I didn’t dismiss her assertion out of hand. In fact we had discussed the possibility several times before. In the event of a disaster, such as the collapse of Julian’s presidency and the ascension to the Executive of hostile agencies, all of us (including Julian) might need to flee the country.

But I fervently hoped those conditions would not arise; or, if they did, that it would happen far in the future, when Flaxie was older and better able to travel. I didn’t like to think of taking an infant on a trans-Atlantic journey. I was not even willing to let Flaxie be taken for rides in the streets of Manhattan, especially not now, with a new Pox circulating and half the citizens going about with paper masks over their noses.

“You can’t leave these arrangements to the last hour,” Calyxa said. “Things need to be set up in advance. We decided on Mediterranean France—”

“Wait—who decided?”

“Emily and I, between us. I consulted the local Parmentierists, and they say it’s an ideal refuge. Emily has connections with people in the shipping business—right now she would have no trouble arranging passage for us, though that might change, with a changing situation.”

“I still hope to spend my life in America and write books,” I said.

“You wouldn’t be the only American author in Marseilles. You can send manuscripts by mail.”

“I’m not sure my publisher would agree to that.”

“If things get much worse in Manhattan, Adam, you may not have a publisher.”

Perhaps that observation was true. But it didn’t cheer me up, or help me sleep.

All the filming of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin was finished by Thanksgiving of 2175. That wasn’t the end of it, of course. What had been captured on film was only the visual portion of the show; to be presented in a theater it still needed voice-actors, noise-makers, intensive rehearsals, and a suitable venue. But a large part of the hardest work was done, especially for the technicians and screen-actors, and Julian thought it would be appropriate to commemorate the moment by hosting what he called a “wrap party.”

The grounds of the Executive Palace had not been a social magnet during Julian’s reign, especially so after the unannounced beheadings. Julian was not discomfited by this, since he didn’t much care for the companionship of high Eupatridians, including even members of the Senate. Although the Senate had been generous toward his regime in the beginning, there had been friction with that branch of the government as well as with the Dominion. Julian did not enact any radical labor legislation,^* but he had refused to dispatch troops during the servile insurrection in the thread trades.^† His implied sympathy for the rebels enraged those Senators who had connections with the trade, and strongly-worded protests had been issued from that body.

So we did not have friendly Eupatridians to invite to our Wrap Party; but that wasn’t a drawback, in Julian’s opinion. Increasingly Julian had chosen to surround himself with a crowd of Aesthetes and Philosophers—not just the movie crew, but a motley assortment of well-born radicals, religious reformers, musicians, Parmentierist tract-writers, artists with more ambition than income, and people of that stripe.

The party took place on the last warm evening of the year. The temperature was nearly tropical, though Thanksgiving was almost on us, and after dark the celebration spilled out onto the great lawn of the Executive Palace. The efficiency of the New York City Hydroelectric Dynamo had lately been improved, and Julian had extended the hours of the Illumination of Manhattan, so that the cumulative light shed by the city’s electric lamps gave the clouds overhead an eerie glow. The Pond and the Hunting Grounds were wrapped in shadow and looked very mysterious and romantic, and the guests and film crew were soon giddy with champagne. They strolled or capered about on the lawn, or shared hempen cigarettes in secluded places, and as the evening wore on their behavior became more flagrant and less discreet.