by James Morrow
‘This is where you get off,’ he announced as the galley slave moored the barge.
‘You promised to take me to the mainland!’ Brat protested.
A fearsome drumming echoed through the marble city, as if a rain made of shrapnel and bones were felling on its streets.
‘I lied,’ said the Hatter.
‘You what?’ screamed Brat.
‘Something wrong with your hearing, General? I’ve got a root back at the shop that cures deafness. I lied. Folks around here don’t like the idea of your war crimes going unpunished. They’re coming, gentlemen. I wouldn’t want to guess what they’ll do when they arrive, but it’s certain to include tearing you limb from limb. You’ll wish you’d taken your chances with the court.’
‘I was going to take my chances with the court!’ said George. The drumming grew louder. Footfalls, he concluded – the clogs, galoshes, pumps, sandals, and buskins of Professor Carter’s citizens. ‘I’m innocent!’
‘Innocent, eh? Then why is the world over?’
‘You gave me spermatids, and now you’re going to have me killed?’ asked George.
Theophilus jumped onto the pier. ‘It’s the post-exchange environment. Nobody behaves rationally any more.’
As the mob rumbled forward, Brat drew Holly’s pistol and aimed it at the Hatter’s chest. ‘Call off your dogs, Carter! Call them off, or I’ll shoot!’
‘There’s a logic to what you’re saying,’ said Theophilus, ‘but, being insane, I cannot grasp it.’
Whereupon George, out of motives he would never fully comprehend, snatched the pistol from Brat and hurled it toward the front of the barge. The weapon glanced off the gladiator’s head, plopping into the dark gray river and vanishing instantly.
‘What’s happening?’ Morning asked.
‘Your lover just saved the Hatter’s life,’ Sverre replied, leaning away from the eyepiece. ‘Oh, and something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re in a lot of trouble with history.’
Up and down the crippled, dawn-lit avenues the bewildered defendants ran, Theophilus’s citizens in frantic pursuit, a booming cloud of invalidated peasants, princes, beggars, scholars, scientists, farmers, clerics, and soldiers. Every time George looked back, he noticed a different category of pre-nuclear weapon. The macabre rattle of spears, swords, muskets, and battle axes filled his ears, mixing with the mob’s computer-generated howls. These things are just puppets, he reminded himself – they cannot harm me. He could understand the post-exchange environment being horrible and depressing, but did it also have to be ludicrous?
As the defendants reached the main gate, a fat citizen with teeth like barbed wire popped out of a turret and, ever beholden to the Z-1000, cried, ‘I am not garbage!’
Stomping mushrooms under their boots, George and Brat ran beyond the walls, through the ravine, across the field of megaliths. Marsh gases hit them like a fist. Spears flew past. As the defendants charged into the muck, tiny fireballs began choking the sky. George glanced over his shoulder. The citizens had deployed a weapon of singular malevolence. Puppets, he recited again. Puppets, they’re just puppets. The flaming arrows fell everywhere, hissing against the silt, setting the dead grass on fire. The air thickened with a smell akin to unadmitted blood. A brawny officer from Genghis Khan’s army, dressed in what looked like the plating of some particularly vile and stupid dinosaur, sent a fireball sizzling over George’s scalp.
Directly ahead lay the submarine, wallowing in the rising tide. George rejoiced to see that the amidships hatch was still ajar. Or am I hallucinating? he wondered. No, it really looked open. There was definitely a chance they would succeed in getting themselves recaptured by Operation Erebus.
But the swamp, George learned, was in conspiracy with the invalidated past. It seized his boots, holding him fast with its dark paste. Brat, he saw, was also stuck, rooted to the island like a tree, writhing and raging. The clockwork mob slogged forward, spears poised, swords waving, flesh slipping from their faces like ill-fitting masks, so that each citizen soon wore a skull’s persistent smile.
Craning his jeopardized neck, George fixed on the hull, and it was at this critical moment in his fortunes, when death-by-history seemed a foregone conclusion, that all eighteen port-side missile doors suddenly flew open, their oil-soaked hinges making no sound. Instantly the ship took on the appearance of a medieval parapet. Olaf Sverre’s navy, armed with scopas suit guns, came streaming out of the hatches, Peach and Cobb in the lead, their chubby faces split by smirks. Oh, brave, splendid men, thought George, you will all receive medals for this. Taking cover behind the battlements, the unadmitted sailors aimed their lovely Colt .45 pistols, their beautiful twelve-gauge shotguns, and their gorgeous HK 91 assault rifles.
Sverre stood atop the sail, his frame tall and sharp against the reddening sky, his stovepipe hat cocked toward the sunrise. A loud, unintelligible noise came from his mouth, a sound that George hoped and prayed was an order to open fire.
Targeted by hands that had been alive for barely two hundred and fifty days, the bullets flew in all directions, but even so random a salvo was enough to drop half the citizens. Relays and motors spurted from busted flesh. Bodies hit the swamp, flopping, wriggling, plastering themselves with silt. A broken samurai rolled up to George’s knees. Its cries evoked a phonograph needle skidding along the surface of a record.
The surviving citizens retaliated. Spears smashed uselessly into the hull, sling-tossed rocks bounced off the missile doors like hail encountering a tin roof. Sverre – oh, excellent soldier, glorious hero – ordered a second salvo. Fifty more died, but history had not yet learned the meaning of defeat. The citizens kept coming. Burning arrows suffused the swamp with smoke and otherworldly light. George felt a trembling in his recently resuscitated . . .
Gonads, thought Sverre. This fight is doing something to my gonads. (Keep it going, men! Let’s get more smoke over there to the left, more chaos to the right, bring up the heavy artillery – I want trumpets, drums, banners, flying earth, explosions of many colors!) When he once again called for fire, he realized that remembered passions were now coursing through his ducts and veins, as if they had been waiting for the proper stimuli. How subtle were the uses of pitched battle! In his mind he left the field, the better to savor the rare and precious images.
Yes, it was all quite clear. He would have invited Kristin the pretty ensign to Barbados, and they would have made love in the open water – a steamy night, smooth breezes, insects and birds surrounding them with primordial jazz. (Did he propose to her that same weekend? Yes, most likely.) Excited by the fabulous souvenir, Sverre’s penis now assumed heroic proportions, pushing against his trousers, eager to get into the world. Oh, how he wished his life had happened, the Caribbean part if nothing else. Unadmittance was so unfair. No wonder he drank.
He ordered a fourth round. Among many others, a Renaissance soldier fell, a young man who had fought side by side with Pope Julius II at the siege of Ferrara. The skull-faced soldier struggled to his feet, drew his sword, and rushed toward the mired defendants.
‘Fire!’ shouted Sverre.
The bullets came in a great slashing volley, dissecting the soldier like so many scalpels, turning him into a heap of rubber and plastic. The defendants laughed with astonishment and relief. And then, suddenly, Sverre saw that it was over, saw that like a nuclear strategist he had run out of targets, and a short while later his fine, impossible erection went away.
After his exec had taken the Erebus defendants from the field and returned them to the ship, Sverre climbed down the hull and, gin bottle at the ready, waded through the biotechnical carnage. He inspected the shattered torsos, the dismembered limbs, the severed pieces of muddy flesh. He was exhilarated and sickened – exhilarated by the slaughter, sickened by his exhilaration.
War, he had learned, was fun. Massacre, when accomplished efficiently and successfully, entails profound emotional fulfillment. Ordering sailors to open f
ire will, under certain conditions, make a man’s blood sing – admitted blood, unadmitted blood, no difference. Ah, but he would sleep well that night, no need for an eye filled with gin! He stared at the mess and wept. By what right do we accuse the Erebus Six? How are we better than they? The tribunal is a fraud. I shall deliver my prisoners – here they are, learned judges, every one of them healthy and intact, mission accomplished – but I shall not dance at their execution.
Half an hour went by. Eighteen hundred seconds that, despite the care he normally took to squeeze every drop from his sojourn, Sverre would never be able to recall. Lieutenant Grass arrived. Paxton and Tarmac were in their cabins, the exec reported. Guards posted, double locks on the doors.
‘Are we cleared for sea, Mister Grass?’ Sverre asked.
‘Cleared for sea – yes, sir.’
‘Then we’d better get on with it.’
‘Take her out?’
‘Take her out.’
‘All engines ahead full?’
‘All engines ahead full.’
‘Set course for McMurdo Station?’
‘Set course for McMurdo Station.’
Harsh winds descended. The morning grew dark. The shadowed ship heaved up and down, back and forth, eager for the open South Atlantic. Sverre crossed the swamp at a funereal pace, drinking, coughing, shuddering from the cold in his rubber eye, cautiously picking his way through the invalidated past.
ENTR’ACTE
Salon-de-Provence, France, 1554
‘. . . cautiously picking his way through the invalidated past.’
Nostradamus’s gloved fingers removed the hot glass painting of Olaf Sverre crossing the swamp. The projected flame bounced off the wall and washed the study in white-gold light.
Jacob Mirabeau’s face was indecipherable, a stone etched with hieroglyphics. But then a yawn of astonishing dimensions appeared.
‘You are bored,’ groaned the prophet. Nocturnal winds troubled the curtains.
‘No, Monsieur – tired,’ said the boy. ‘I would be asleep by now were this show of yours not so terrifying. I fear to dream. Nightmares would stalk me, worse than when the plague came.’
‘Terrifying, did you say?’ Nostradamus clapped his hands. ‘Nightmares? Splendid!’ The night air swelled with flower scent and cricket music. ‘Everybody loves a good fright.’
‘Will George get his sterility back?’
‘His fertility. When the medical officer checked him out, his seminiferous tubules had definitely begun spermatid production.’
‘I remember – spermatids are baby sperm. That’s what the Hatter said.’
‘Very good, Master Jacob.’
‘What are sperm?’
‘People won’t know about them until Leeuwenhoek’s microscope studies in 1677. If you’ve been following the plot, you understand that George needs to steer his spermatids into his epididymis, so that they can achieve motility and enter his vas deferens.’
‘I liked the battle.’
‘I assumed you would.’
‘Captain Sverre reminds me a bit of you.’
‘Yes. I can see that. He’s rather noble, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, yes.’
Cries came, jagged shapes of pain cutting through the floor from below. The boy shuddered, hugged himself, began breathing in frog gulps.
Nostradamus stretched out his hand, and Jacob’s shoulder rose to meet it. The boy grew calm under the prophet’s gnarled touch.
‘Why does God make it so painful?’ Jacob asked. ‘Why does He punish all women for the sin of Eve?’
‘God is not the problem. The babies are the problem – their big heads. Ah, but they must be that big to hold our brains. Look here – the next painting. It will take your mind off your mother.’
The wall exploded in silver glaciers advancing between snow-cloaked mountains.
‘To appreciate the rest of the tale, Jacob, you must know something of its setting. Antarctica comprises—’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you – what is this Antarctica everybody keeps talking about?’
‘A continent. The English explorer James Cook will discover the first evidence of it in 1772. Might I assume you’ve run out of interruptions?’
‘Sorry, Monsieur.’
‘The continent of Antarctica comprises . . .’
BOOK TWO
For Destruction Ice Is Also Great
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In Which Our Hero Is Treated like a Common Criminal and Endures an Uncommon Torture
The continent of Antarctica comprises five million square miles of ice heaped atop a grim and frigid bedrock. It is, on the whole, a useless place. When the world had countries, even the most enterprising of them could not profitably contrive to extract the continent’s oil, gas, copper, iron, or coal. Antarctica is ten degrees below zero on a hot day. The Soviet Union once recorded a temperature at Vostok Station of minus 126.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Near the middle of the twentieth century, the love of peace reached such a fever pitch among the nations of the earth that they signed an agreement declaring that they would not go to war over this depressing and inconvenient pile of nothing. Thirteen sovereign states agreed to put aside their conflicting territorial claims. You would not need a passport to visit the ice block.
Near the end of that same century, almost four decades after the 1959 Antarctica Treaty was signed, a caravan of six Sno-Cats began a journey along the western edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, from McMurdo Sound to the Nimrod Glacier. To George Paxton, who sat in the back of the lead Cat, the vehicles suggested Sherman tanks designed by Unitarians: treads, metal plating, slotted windows, no guns. Clumsy and slow, the Cats traversed the shelf like giant armadillos waddling across a white desert.
Staring toward the Transantarctic Mountain Range, George felt his newborn spermatids thrash about in his seminiferous tubules. ‘It’s a miracle!’ Dr Brust had declared upon examining him. ‘But am I fertile?’ George wanted to know. ‘Fertile?’ said the medical officer. ‘Not by a long shot. Spermatids as feeble as these, they haven’t got any future. Hey, Paxton, don’t you know there’s been an extinction? The world has no use for human chromosomes.’
A sign bounced past: ICE LIMBO 414 – FIVE KILOMETERS. ‘Just wait, my little friends,’ he muttered in the direction of his spermatids. ‘Somehow I shall get you to the endpoint of the earth’s axis.’ He turned from the window. A narrow-eyed young woman guarded him with a Remington twelve-gauge shotgun. Her nameplate said GILA GUIZOT, and her scopas suit – ‘excellent for keeping out the cold,’ as Sverre had explained on the boat – displayed the Bleeding Hand insignia of the Antarctic National Police. On meeting George, the first thing Gila Guizot had done was kick him in his resuscitated gonads.
The transfer of George’s person from US Navy custody to the International Military and Civilian Tribunal had occurred in one of McMurdo Station’s many corrugated-steel huts, a morbid place guarded by the national police and lit by whale-oil lamps. George sat on a wooden stool. His recently issued scopas suit was riddled with holes, so that sadistic little streams of Antarctic air flogged him whenever the door opened. Every half-hour a liaison from some unadmitted faction or other would enter the hut, taking a seat behind a snow hummock carved to resemble a desk. Scribes recorded George’s deposition. Name? Birthplace? Religious convictions? Political affiliations? Were New Orleans restaurants as good as I remember them? Was California really warm and sunny most of the time? King Lear – that was a truly fine night in the theater, wasn’t it? Bach was brilliant, if memory serves. Could you hum me a Bach tune, Mr Paxton? Bach would have moved me to tears, I think.
His ally throughout these interrogations was Dennie Howe, an agonizingly attractive young darkblood with sharp turquoise eyes and a double-decker smile. As soon as George entered the hut, she identified herself as Bonenfant’s chief assistant and explained that she would be using her several degrees in international law to keep George’s inquisitors at bay. My cl
ient does not have to answer that question. My client is not obliged to initial that extradition paper. My client is entitled to a cup of . . .
Coffee, thought George as the caravan entered Ice Limbo 414. I would do anything for a cup of coffee right now. They rumbled down the main street of the community. Police officers patrolled the sidewalks, keeping the demonstrators in line. Boos and hisses wafted into the Cat, making George’s bullet wound ache and his spermatids cringe. The passing signs and banners were lettered with dried black blood. NO ACQUITTALS FOR WAR CRIMINALS . . . HANG THE ABORTIONISTS OF THE HUMAN RACE . . . AND HITLER BEGAT WENGERNOOK . . . MAKE RANDSTABLE EXTINCT . . . ADMIT US. George noticed a few dissenters. FREE THE ARMAGEDDON SIX . . . NO VIGILANTE VENGEANCE . . . LET THEM EXPLAIN THEMSELVES . . . PAXTON WAS FRAMED. An embarrassed thrill passed through him, as when the Wildgrove Eagle had published his letter protesting the plan to turn part of Rosehaven Cemetery into a golf course.
He looked beyond the sidewalks. For many darkbloods, time was too precious to spend on activism. In the side yard of Barrack F a mother and her daughter tossed a snow basketball back and forth. Next door an elderly man with rippling white sideburns stood on a hummock and pretended to conduct an orchestra, while behind Barrack W an adolescent boy attempted to make a Weddell seal jump through a hoop.
Eggs sailed out of the crowd, splattering the sides of the Cat. Thick wads of embryonic penguin seeped down George’s window. A rock flew from the scopas-gloved hand of an angry young Oriental woman, thunked into the windshield, and left a starburst.
‘That does it!’ shouted Dimitri Eliopoulos, a fat bespectacled man of volatile enthusiasms and potential Greek ancestry. He slapped the steering wheel with his palm. ‘From now on we stay clear of the population centers!’
The caravan got through Ice Limbo 414 without further incident.
