My last book (before this one) was American Boys on the Moon, which sold well even without a Dominion Stamp.^† The book was praised by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, who also survived the fire, though he is even older than my venerable typewriter, and is drawing his career to a close. I took inspiration for American Boys on the Moon from my copy of the History of Mankind in Space. That antique book sits on my desk now, along with a number of other mementos salvaged from the Palace grounds—a faded letter which begins Lieftse Hannie; a train ticket, validated from Montreal to New York City; a Comstock dollar with Deklan Conqueror’s face on it (Julian didn’t last long enough to mint his own coins); a play-bill from the Broadway debut of Darwin; a decorative Knocker (badly stained); and other such items as that. Tomorrow I’ll pack them away again.

As if in silent commentary the breeze flaps the pages of a calendar hanging on the wall. Hard to believe that in only eight years we’ll be entering the twenty-third century! Time is mysterious to me—I can’t get accustomed to how it passes. Perhaps I’ve become old-fashioned, forever a Twenty-Second Century Man.

Now Calyxa comes through my study on her way to the garden. Our villa sits on a high bluff, and the property grows little more than sea-grass and sand, but Calyxa has long since walled off a square of good soil, and she plants it every year with lavender, mimosa, and sunflowers. She has been an invaluable resource in the writing of my Julian memoir—filling out exact French phrases from my memory of a few dim words, and copying the sentences for me with accents grave and aigu and such frills.

Today she pauses and gives me a cryptic smile. “Tu es l’homme le plus gentil et le plus innocent que je connaisse,” she says. “Tu rends les laideurs de la vie supportables. Sans toi, elles seraient insoutenables.”

No doubt this is some mild joke at my expense, for Calyxa is skeptical by nature, and often couches her ironies in French, which after sixteen years in this country I still do not confidently understand. “That’s what you think,” I tell her; and she laughs as she walks away, her white skirt swirling about her ankles.

I mean to leave my typewriter and follow her. The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.

^* But not for the purpose of carrying supplies to the Parmentierist rebels who hide out in the caves there—she was cleared of that charge.

^† Sam had a few criticisms of that work. He argued that a Space Rocket, buried for a century and a half under the sands of Florida, could not be put into working order by a mere band of boys, even if some of them were students of the mechanical arts. Perhaps not; but they could hardly have got to the moon by any other means, and I let the improbability stand.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Julian Comstock could not have been written without the generosity and support of people too numerous to list (including, once again, my endlessly patient wife, Sharry). Of the legions of used-book dealers I consulted in the course of my research, two deserve special mention: Jeffrey Pickell, at Kaleidoscope Books & Collectibles in Ann Arbor, who first drew my attention to the work of “Oliver Optic” (William Taylor Adams), and Terry Grogan, at BMV Books in Toronto, who has an absolutely uncanny talent for finding the right book at the right time. Many thanks also to Mischa Hautvast, Peter Hohenstein, Mark Goodwin, and Claire-Gabriel Robert for help with the Dutch and French passages—any errors are, of course, all mine. And, not least, my sincere thanks to Peter Crowther, of PS Publishing, whose handsome chapbook edition of “Julian: A Christmas Story” opened the door for this much larger work.