Three of the masked Men in Red graced the scene with their presence, which made life three times more dangerous than life had been the night before. Julian watched them, smiling in his best mellow fashion, to hide his pride and his dread.
All his glamorous, shining young men, striking their poses on the tiny stage, with their young, strong, beautiful bodies … Maybe it could be said that Julian had saved them from deadly danger. It might also be said that he was fiddling as the city burned.
Julian knew that a settling of accounts was near. A time of such tension needed only one provocation. An obscure clash by night, a sudden insult offered, an insult stingingly returned, and Dandy William Idaho had been beaten senseless in the street. Bili was crushed, spurned, trampled on, and spat upon. Bili had never been the kind of kid you could hit just once.
Then the troubles started. Bitter quarrels, flung stones near glass houses … The police restored order through the simple pretext of attacking the foreigners. Everybody knew that the foreigners in the city were thieves, because so many had been forced to be thieves. No one of good sense and property was going to defend any thieves.
The police richly enjoyed the luscious irony of the police robbing thieves. So the police kicked in the doors of some of the wealthier foreigners, and seized everything they had.
Julian spent the night of that seminar activating an electrical generator. Electrical generators had been true fetish objects for the remote founders of Selder. Periodically, as a gesture of respect to antiquity, some scholar would disinter an old generator and rebuild another new generator in the same shape. So Julian owned a generator, packed in its moldering, filthy grease. It had elaborate, hand-etched schematics to explain how to work it.
This electrical night was not nearly so successful as the earlier seminar nights. After much cursing and honest puzzlement, the students managed to get the generator assembled. They even managed to crank it. It featured some spots of bare metal that stung the bare hand with a serpent’s bite. Other than that, it was merely an ugly curio. The generator did not create any visible mystical powers or spiritual transcendence. Society did not advance to a higher plane of being.
Next day, the emboldened police repressed some of the darker elements of the old regime. These arrogant time-servers were notorious for their corruption. So the police beat the fancy crooks like dogs and kicked them out the door, and the crowd cheered that action, too.
People spoke quite openly of who would be serving in the Other Man’s new regime, and what kind of posts they would hold.
The Favorite for the post of Godfather acted the fine gentleman: He urged calm, made dignified noises, and temporized. In the meantime, the gate guards had been bribed. Exiles poured into the city. The sentence of exile had been the merciful punishment of the late Godfather’s later years. Now it became clear that the Godfather had merely exported resentments to a future date. These exiles—those among them who survived—had become hard, weathered men. They knew what they had lost. They also knew what they had to regain.
So there were more clashes, this time with gangs of hardened cutthroats. The Favorite pulled up his stakes and fled in terror.
Julian spent that night explaining how to use electricity and virtuality to connect the soul of Man with the planet Venus.
There was a large crowd for his last hermetic ceremony, and not because it was such an interesting topic. People had fled to Julian’s refuge because the city was convulsed with fear.
It had always been said of the people of Selder that they would shed their own blood rather than lose one drop of water. Like many clichés, that was true. The smothered resentments of a long, peaceful reign were all exposed to the open air. That meant beatings, break-ins, and back-alley backstabbings.
The elections were held in conditions of desperate haste, because only one man was fit to restore order.
To his credit, the new Godfather took prompt action. He averted anarchy through the simple tactic of purging all his opponents.
Julian surrendered peaceably. He had rather imagined that he might have to. The grass that bent before the wind would stand upright again, he reasoned. The world was still scarred with the windblown wrecks of long-dead forests.
Prison was dark, damp, and dirty. The time in prison weighed heavily on a man’s soul. Julian had nothing to write with, nothing to read. He never felt the sun, or breathed any fresh air.
