This Is the Way the World Ends (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Morrow

  ‘Looks like my best shot is to buy a costume and disappear into this Mardi Gras thing until the tide takes Sverre away,’ said Brat. ‘Are you really determined to get your balls back in order?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I imagine I’ve got some pretty fantastic adventures ahead. I could use a man like you on my team, somebody who’s smart, strong . . . a little pig-headed.’

  ‘Sorry, Brat. A cure, then Antarctica, then a family – I’ve seen it all.’

  The bells tinkled mournfully as the defendants entered. Gushing sweat, they wove through the vast collection of costumed mannequins. World War Three had not been kind to Carter’s inventory. The disintegrating tweeds of Edwardian gentlemen dusted the broken armor of Japanese knights. Eighteenth-century waistcoats rubbed tattered shoulders with nineteenth-century gowns.

  ‘Do you need lodgings?’ a voice called out in a British accent. ‘Several funerals are happening upstairs. Would you like a room with a viewing?’

  The MAD Hatter had aged, not by the decades that had elapsed outside the darkblood realms, but enough to push him past the mortal side of sixty – eyes receding, red hair fading toward pink, brow stippled with liver spots. His top hat appeared to have contracted eczema.

  ‘I was sorry to hear of your species’s death,’ he said. ‘I meant to send a sympathy card. They don’t make belated sympathy cards, do they? “So sorry I missed your mother’s bout with cancer.” ’

  For the first time since the celebration banquet, George’s bullet wound began to throb. ‘I’m in a lot of trouble because of you, Professor.’

  ‘Trouble?’ said the Hatter.

  ‘I’m on trial for ending the world.’

  ‘Just remember, it could be worse. You could not be on trial for ending the world. You could be the corpus delicti instead. Signing that sales contract was the smartest thing you ever did.’

  ‘Hey, you know this bird?’ Brat asked of George.

  Theophilus pulled off his hat. ‘Bird? The raven is a bird, also the vulture, but not I. You’re not a bird either, General Tarmac, though we’d all be better off if you were. Say, George, did you ever find out why a raven is like a writing desk?’

  ‘Right now I’m trying to find out about fertility. My secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’

  The Hatter’s sigh was long and musical. ‘There just isn’t much reproduction going on in the world any more, is there? What with the extinction and everything. These post-exchange environments have little to recommend them.’

  ‘Extinction?’ said Brat. ‘Nonsense, the streets are teeming with your customers. You must do a pretty good business around carnival time.’

  Spontaneously – no one knew who was leading and who following – the three men went to the window. The parade crawled across the plaza like some huge organism, flagella and antennae lashing in all directions.

  ‘Welcome to the City of the Invalidated Past,’ said the Hatter, ‘or, if you prefer, the Necropolis of History, or, if you don’t prefer, the City of the Invalidated Past. It’s your kind of town, George. Yours too, General.’ He jabbed his index finger toward the window. ‘Look, there’s a guard from the court of Harun al-Rashid in eighth-century Baghdad. And a Roman civil engineer who built a water mill in 143 BC. A merchant responsible for bringing improved plow designs to Flanders in 1074. A bishop who participated in the Council of Trent. A worker on Henry Ford’s original assembly line . . . Think about it! These people actually lived!’ Theophilus held his top hat in front of his heart. ‘They got up each morning. They breathed, argued, screwed, moved their bowels. They saw the sun. They had opinions about cats. Listen, do you hear it? Do you hear their sorrow? Their sobs and wails? They’re sad because they’ve been invalidated. When you turn the human race into garbage, you also turn history into garbage. “Why did we bother to invent writing?” they ask. “Or spinning jennies? Why did we trouble ourselves with the cathedrals?” ’

  They followed the Hatter’s short beckoning arm as he led them back to the counter, behind the velvet drapes, and into a hot, squalid room suggesting a laboratory from which nothing beneficial ever issued. Detached human heads were suspended over steaming vats of what looked like liquid flesh. Disconnected limbs swam in tanks of purple fluid. Skeletons dangled from the ceiling as if waiting to make their entrances in some demented marionette show. George felt that he was about as far from a fertility clinic as he could get.

  ‘This is where Victor Frankenstein did his post-graduate work,’ said Theophilus. Rusty surgical instruments and corroded technological bric-a-brac filled a dozen cabinets. ‘This is where Thomas Edison invented the burned-out light bulb.’

  The Hatter, George decided, had lost his mind. Was it possible for a lunatic to go mad?

  Tea things overran a linen-swathed table. Hungry and thirsty from their dash across the island, the fugitives sat down and indulged themselves, gulping hot tea, gobbling their way through a heap of stale rolls and crumpets. The Hatter joined them.

  ‘Every night, corpses float through the city,’ he explained merrily, smearing butter on a bran muffin.

  ‘War victims?’ A silly question, George thought. Of course they were war victims.

  ‘No, they died long before the war, centuries before in some cases. I pull them from the river. I dress them. I perform surgery. No problem finding spare parts. The whole world is made of spare parts now. Out go the shriveled organs and the dehydrated blood. In go the relays, motors, microprocessors, voice synthesizers, and spark plugs. But does that do it? Of course not. What is history without hopes, ideals, neuroses, illusions? Hence – my Z-1000 computer over there. Isn’t it wonderful what a man can do with a little technology and some free time?’

  ‘Oh, I get it – they’re robots!’ said Brat. ‘It’s like Walt Disney.’

  ‘If admitted,’ said Theophilus, ‘I would have lived in the early twenty-first century, turning out automatons as efficiently as a cobbler turns out shoes.’ He went to his work table and began transferring eyeballs from one glass jar to another, tossing the rejects into a teacup.

  ‘This can’t be the shop you had back in Boston,’ said George. How far the Hatter had sunk – from designing scopas suits to desecrating war victims.

  ‘My humble establishment is like the submarine from which you escaped,’ Theophilus explained. ‘It flits about from place to place. More twenty-first century know-how.’

  ‘I must say, Carter, you’ve got an impressive project under way here,’ said Brat. ‘My hat goes off to you.’

  ‘First I have to sell you one.’

  ‘Probably not the best way to keep civilization afloat, but still ingenious.’ The MARCH Hare grabbed a crumpet, slammed it into his tea.

  ‘Brat, those aren’t people in that parade!’ said George. ‘Don’t you understand?’

  The Hatter cackled.

  Brat ate the soggy crumpet. ‘In any event, it’s this flying shop of yours that really interests me. I’m trying to hook up with the other survivors. Can you run me over to the mainland?’

  ‘Most ambitious, General,’ said Theophilus. ‘You can’t make deals with extinction, but you can make deals with me. To wit – help us with tonight’s labors, and I shall fly you wherever you want.’

  A hospital gurney displayed the topography of a sheeted female corpse. Approaching, the Hatter uncovered her. She was Oriental and, considering her water-logged condition, quite beautiful.

  ‘Born in the twelfth century. Southeast Asia, the Khmer Empire. These eyes once beheld the Angkor Wat temple complex for the royal phallic cult. Imagine – a royal phallic cult once existed in medieval Cambodia!’

  ‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ snapped George, restoring the sheet.

  ‘I have nothing but respect for the dead,’ said the Hatter. ‘Why do you think I work so hard on the parade? Night and day – my monument to the invalidated past. You know about monuments.’

  ‘This is lunatic’s business!’ said George. He ma
de a fist but could not decide what to do with it. ‘Disgusting! She isn’t from the twelfth century, she’s just another victim of radiation or hunger or—’

  ‘Actually, I find the whole thing rather sane,’ said Brat.

  ‘Sane? Sane? Call me sane, will you?’ screamed the Hatter. ‘They called the Joint Chiefs of Staff sane! They called the National Security Council sane!’

  He went to his Z-1000 computer, arching his fingers over the keyboard as if playing a concerto.

  ‘Mostly it’s the supporting cast of history who wash up here, but sometimes we get a star. On Sunday I found Nostradamus, that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting scholar of the Renaissance. What I wouldn’t give for Hitler. I can change the past, you see – I can improve it. Last night Joan of Arc burned ten priests at the stake. If I had Hitler, I’d make him Jewish. Spermatids, George? Was that your wish? Little baby sperm? You’ve come to the right place.’

  ‘I have to see a fertility expert.’

  ‘I am one. I can make you as fertile as an alley cat.’

  The Hatter dashed into a dark alcove, its entrance flanked by two dressmaker’s dummies, headless and skinny. Seconds later he emerged holding a crumbling, mossy hunk of bark. A white mushroom – robust, symmetrical, and shaped like a church bell – clung to the wood. ‘Behold your friend and mine, Agaricus cameroonis.’

  ‘Toadstools can be poison, I hear,’ said George.

  ‘Thermonuclear mushrooms cause sterility, Cameroon mushrooms cure it. Or, to be technical, Cameroon mushrooms promote spermatid production in irradiated seminiferous tubules. This fact has been known since 2015 AD.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Have you a choice?’

  George’s bullet wound was thumping crazily now. Why couldn’t Mrs Covington’s magic lantern show have been more explicit on this matter? A simple slide of him devouring a Cameroon mushroom – was that too much to ask? Why did the post-exchange environment involve so damn many decisions?

  ‘Walk through our forest on a moonlit night,’ said the Hatter, ‘and with luck you’ll spot Agaricus cameroonis lifting his wan head through the crevice in a rotting log. But don’t expect to see him there the next day, for at the first blush of dawn he slips back into his palace of decay and hides. You’re looking at a rare one, George, a collector’s item. You aren’t going to find this fellow in your local drug store.’

  ‘All right. I’ll eat it.’

  ‘Nope. Sorry. Bad idea.’ Theophilus thrust the Agaricus cameroonis under his morning coat. ‘You don’t really want children. They make a lot of noise, they spill their milk, they leave their crayons all over the place.’

  ‘Please . . .’

  ‘First you must answer the question.’ He rubbed the concealed fungus.

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Ah – what question? Good question.’

  ‘Maybe he means the question about the raven and the writing desk,’ said Brat.

  ‘Yes! That’s it!’ said the Hatter. ‘Nobody has figured that one out!’

  Nobody except Dr William Randstable, thought George, struggling to avoid a grin.

  ‘Beyond their expertise in spermatid production,’ said the Hatter, ‘Cameroon mushrooms make marvelous soup and terrific—’

  ‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said George, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said a raven is like a writing desk’ – he paused for dramatic effect – ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

  The Hatter huffed and puffed like Rumpelstiltskin hearing the miller’s daughter say, ‘Is your name Rumpelstiltskin?’ He did a manic little dance, smashing his high-button shoes into the floor.

  ‘You must promise to name all the children after me,’ he said as he pulled the Agaricus cameroonis from his coat.

  ‘All but the first,’ said George.

  He tore the mushroom from its bark, thrust it in his mouth. The meat trembled on his tongue, and he chewed. It tasted like what it was, mushroom flesh, tangy, succulent, damp. A soft buzz traveled from his stomach to his gonads. As he closed his eyes, his mind overflowed with his psychic museum – pictures of his forthcoming family thriving in the timefolds. Aubrey and her siblings romped through a tropical paradise. Glow-faced boys devoured uncontaminated fruit. Lithe girls swam in clean waves.

  Nostradamus was on to something, Mrs Covington had said.

  ‘Is that it?’ George asked. ‘Am I fertile now?’

  ‘No,’ said the Hatter.

  ‘But soon – right?’

  ‘Nope. Sorry.’

  ‘You said I’d be an alley cat.’

  ‘Spermatids do you no good until they enter your epididymis, where they can mature, grow tails, acquire motility, and learn the facts of life. Unfortunately, your Spermatids will be too feeble for that.’

  ‘Too feeble?’

  ‘Weak as newborn babes.’

  ‘Can I help them?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The South Pole.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The magnetic forces at the South Pole have been known to steer spermatids on their proper course.’

  ‘The South Pole – in Antarctica?’

  ‘This sounds like bushwa to me,’ said Brat. ‘I’d be careful if I were you, Paxton.’

  ‘Stand on the exact endpoint of the earth’s axis for one full minute,’ said Theophilus with the imperial confidence of a contract bridge champion sitting down to a game of go fish, ‘and the next day you’ll be able to book passage for four hundred million sperm at a time.’

  ‘Paxton just ate a mushroom,’ said Sverre, squinting into Periscope Number One.

  ‘Why?’ asked Morning.

  ‘To cure his sterility,’ said Sverre. ‘State of the art medicine, circa 2015.’

  ‘He’s been wanting a family.’

  ‘If there’s justice in this world, he’ll get a noose.’

  ‘I believe he’s innocent.’

  ‘You love him, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ She nudged Sverre away from the eyepiece and focused on her beloved.

  He was crossing the plaza, Brat on one side, the MAD Hatter on the other. They cut through the spastic parade and approached the river, its dark surface swept by moonbeams and wisps of fog.

  ‘I seem to recall that sex was something quite special,’ said Sverre. ‘Had I lived, I would have been a devotee of sex.’

  ‘Sex was something quite special,’ Morning confirmed. How perfect George looked as he moved down the concrete steps and jumped onto the Hatter’s barge – how right was the sweat on his brow, how correct the cords of his muscles.

  Sverre noted her wistful smile. ‘What is it like, Dr Valcourt?’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Having red blood. Living.’

  ‘Ambiguous.’

  The captain pointed to the long black scab on his forearm. ‘Then it is in every way better than unadmittance.’

  Removing his stovepipe hat, he blew on the fur and watched it tremble. A memory dragged itself forward like a dying animal. He clutched at it. Intimations of mortality. A blur. Something to do with love. Love for a parent? A child? Sharper now. A wife. He would have been married. Christine? No, Kristin . . . Kristin who? He couldn’t recall her last name. Kristin the pretty ensign. She would have been crazy about amusement parks. He saw her on a merry-go-round. Kristin, lovely Kristin, astride a wooden horse, going merrily around, singing, laughing.

  Dissolving . . .

  He reached out with his spindly fingers, stroked Morning’s cheek. ‘You are a woman of great passion. I felt that when I hired you.’ A tear formed in his right eye, a drop of gin in his left, and he pulled away. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t call you to my bed. I am more honorable than that.’

  And less potent, he thought.

  The bottle had wrecked him. His Number One Periscope did not go up.

  ‘You must understand – Paxton is my patient,’
said Morning, tightening her grip on the scope handle. ‘I cured him. Naturally I want him to have ambitions.’

  Pacing furiously around the room, Sverre attempted to coax additional Kristin images out of his brain – a fruitless enterprise, as he knew it would be – then returned to Morning and asked, ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘On a barge,’ she reported. ‘They’re collecting war dead. The Hatter is frustrated. He wants all of history in his parade, and he’s afraid that it will always be . . .’

  ‘Incomplete!’ wailed the Hatter. ‘Lord knows I try, but there’s a limit to what one man can do.’

  The fugitives crouched in the stem and surveyed the night’s catch. Theophilus had made them fishers of men; under the influence of George’s muscled arms, four corpses had risen from the river. Droplets speckled their brine-cured flesh. Grave robbing, George realized – whether the violated medium was earth or water – was a damning, unholy enterprise, blasphemous even by Unitarian standards.

  ‘A fine haul, no doubt about it,’ said the Hatter, misreading George’s dazed look. ‘Still, we have a long way to go.’

  According to Theophilus, they had retrieved a former patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a gladiator whose highly entertaining death had occurred in 56 BC, a clerk employed by the Bank of Amsterdam from 1610 to 1629, and a Viking.

  A resurrected galley slave poled the barge forward. Blind marble houses glided by. Bridges passed overhead, dark arching shapes that put George in mind of his vulture.

  ‘Do you realize I don’t have a single subject of the Pharaoh Akhnaton? Not one.’ Bubbles of sweat dotted the Hatter’s forehead. ‘The Arabian Caliphate and Abu Bakr? Nobody. The Gupta Court of fourth-century India? Zero!’ Lunging forward, he grabbed George’s shirt, bunching the material in his fists. ‘And victims? Don’t remind me! There’s a severe victim shortage in this city, I can tell you. Yes, I’ve got Napoleon covered, and the Trojan War, but what about the Young Turk Revolution of 1908? The Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842? The Crusades, for Christ’s sake! Don’t even talk to me about the Crusades!’

  The Hatter took the tiller and steered them toward a concrete pier. The moonstruck water threw bright, dancing sine waves on the steps leading up to the street.