“A noose is what you’re staring at, if you don’t desist! You act as if you can proclaim any doctrine you like, and enforce it with soldiers—”

“Can’t I? Isn’t that exactly what my uncle did?”

“And where is your uncle now?”

Julian looked away.

“The enemies of a President hold daggers in their hands,” Sam went on. “The more enemies, the more daggers. You offended the Dominion—well, that can’t be undone. You’ve defied the Senate, which doubles your danger. And if these orders reach the Army of the Californias—”

“The orders have been dispatched. They can’t be withdrawn.”

“You mean you won’t withdraw them!”

“No,” Julian said, in a softer but no less hostile tone. “No, I won’t.”

There were smaller chairs arrayed before the Throne, presumably for lesser dignitaries to sit in. Sam kicked one of these chairs with his foot and sent it screeching across the tiled floor. “I will not let you commit suicide!”

“You’ll do as you’re told, and be quiet about it! The fact that you married my mother doesn’t make you my master! I had but one father, and he was killed by Deklan Conqueror.”

“If I protected you all these years, Julian, it was out of my loyalty to your father, and my affection for you, and for no other reason! I don’t have any ambition to sit on a throne, or meddle with the man who does so!”

“But you didn’t protect me, Sam, and you do meddle! By all rights I should have died in the Goose Bay Campaign! Everything that’s happened since then is just a ridiculously prolonged last gasp—can’t you see that?”

“That’s not the sort of thing your father would ever have said, or allowed you to say.”

“Your debt to my father is your own business. Mine was paid in full, with Deklan’s head.”

“You can’t salve your conscience with an execution! Bryce Comstock would tell you the same thing, if he was here.”

Julian had ceased shouting, but his anger had not abated. It had run underground, instead, and glittered in his eyes like a rushing torrent glimpsed through the crevice of a glacier. “Thank you for your advice. But there’s nothing more to discuss. You’re dismissed.”

Sam looked as if he might kick over another chair. But he didn’t. His shoulders slumped, and he turned to the door, defeated.

“Talk to him if you can,” he whispered to me on his way out. “I can’t.”

“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” Julian said as Sam’s footsteps faded down the corridor.

I advanced to the foot of the Throne. “Lymon Pugh tipped me off. He was afraid it might come to blows.”

“Not quite.”

“What did you do, Julian, that offended Sam so much?”

“Declared a sort of war, in his view.”

“Haven’t you had enough of war yet?”

“It’s nothing to do with the Dutch. There’s been a rebellion in Colorado Springs. Yesterday the Council of the Dominion told their parish Deacons to disobey any Presidential mandate that conflicts with ecclesiastical regulations.”

“Is that what you call a rebellion? It sounds more like a lawyer’s brief.”

“It amounts to an expressed wish to overthrow me!”

“And I suppose you can’t tolerate that.”

“Tonight I declared the City of Colorado Springs a treasonous territory, and I ordered the Army of the Californias to capture it and establish military law.”

“A whole Army to occupy one city?”

“An Army and more, if that’s what it takes to overthrow the Council and burn the Dominion Academy to the ground. Traitorous Deacons, should any survive, can be tried in court for their crimes.”

“Colorado Springs is an American city, Julian. The Army might not like to raze it.”

“The Army has many opinions, but only one Commander in Chief.”

“Won’t innocent civilians get killed in the fighting, though?”

“What fight ever spared the innocent?” Julian scowled and glared. “Do you think I can sit in this chair and not imagine blood, Adam Hazzard? Blood, yes; blood, granted! Blood on all sides! Blood past, present, and future! I didn’t ask for this job, but I don’t deceive myself about the nature of it.”

“Well,” I said, not wanting to provoke him into another outburst, “I expect it’ll work out all right in the end, if you say so.”

He stared at me as if I had contradicted him. “There are rules about entering this room—do you know that, Adam? I don’t suppose you do. Visitors customarily bow when they cross the threshold. Senators bow, ambassadors from distant nations bow, even the clergy is obliged to bow. The rule doesn’t exempt Athabaska lease-boys, to my knowledge.”

“No? Well, it’s a fine room, but I’m not sure it requires any genuflection on my part. I didn’t bow down to you when we were shooting squirrels by the River Pine, and I don’t think I could get in the habit of doing it now. I’ll leave, if you like.”

Perhaps I sounded sharp. Julian’s face was immobile for a long moment. Then his expression changed yet again.

Incredibly, he smiled. He looked, for a moment, years younger. “Adam, Adam … I would be more insulted if you bowed than if you didn’t. You’re right, and I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

“No offense given or taken, in that case.”

“I’m tired, and I’m tired of quarreling.”

“You ought to go to bed, then.”

“No—it wouldn’t work. It’s been days since I was able to sleep. But at least we can put Colorado Springs out of our minds. Would you like to see something unusual, Adam? Something from the days of the Secular Ancients?”

“I suppose so … if you want to show it to me.”

If anything had lately alarmed me about Julian’s behavior it was the way his moods and whims darted about as unpredictably as minnows in a fish-pool. The tendency had first become obvious when he was producing The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. He would appear on the set unannounced, and stalk around like an Oriental tyrant, demanding petty changes to the scenery or harassing the actors. Then the intemperance would pass from his mind as quickly as a cloud shadow crosses a prairie meadow, and he would smile sheepishly and offer apologies and praise. “Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”

I wished he wouldn’t wear the crown at all; for it plagued him, and made him imperious, and confused his mind.

He came down from his high chair and put his arm across my shoulder. “A fresh discovery from the Dominion Archives. Do you remember when I told you there were ancient Movies hidden there?”

“Yes—but not in any form we could see, you said.”

“And I said I would assign a Technician to work on the problem. Well, there’s been some success in the project. Come downstairs, Adam, and I’ll a show you a Movie that hasn’t been seen for two hundred years—part of one, at least.”

It turned out Julian had established a Cinema Room in the lower section of the Palace, useful for work on Darwin as well as the restoration of ancient moving pictures. I didn’t like to go into the basement of the Palace, as a rule, for it was a cold place even in warm weather, and I had heard of the prison cells and interrogation chambers located there. But the Cinema Room was a new installation, wholly modern and tolerably warm. Unusual machines and chemical baths had been installed there, along with a pristine white Movie Screen at one end and an elaborate Mechanical Projector at the other.

“Most of the films we found were crudely stored and eroded beyond repair,” said Julian. “Even the best of them were only partially recoverable, but what a treasure nonetheless,” and I heard in his voice an echo of the Julian Comstock who had pawed through books in the Tip outside Williams Ford with just such rapt fascination. “Lately I like to come down here at night, when it’s still and quiet, and watch these fragments. Here,” he said, picking up a can the size of a pie-plate, “this is a film called On the Beach, from the twentieth century—about half an hour of it. The original was longer, of course, and had recorded sound and such refinements.”