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

by James Morrow

  She’s made good on her scheme, Captain Sverre concluded when Juan Ramos failed to return to the white Cat. He smiled, pleased that his final voyage had not been made in the service of the McMurdo Agreement’s framers and their show trial. Pivoting the periscope, he watched a search party swarm across the Nimrod Glacier; their lanterns bobbed among the hummocks like wills-o’-the-wisp. He looked toward the plateau, focused on a black and menacing shape cutting across the southern constellations. A Soviet Spitball cruise missile? No – a teratorn. For unto them a species will be born. Fly, George. Fly, Morning . . .

  ‘Fly, Teratornis!’ George screamed.

  Although he had ample cause to feel that his escape was a mirage, the wish-dream of a man confronting doom, the plausible discomforts of the flight told George that all was real. Bird riding was far less romantic than he would have guessed. Teratorns, it seemed, were flying ecosystems, their feathers clogged with parasites – worms, bugs – and the parasites of parasites. The wind lashed George’s face; it bored under his skin and made icy tunnels in his bones. The bird’s cervical vertebrae defied the padding of his suit, cutting into his thighs. The oozy odor of vulture sweat, death left in the sun, blew into his nostrils. Yes, this was truly happening.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he called above the hysterical wind, certain that at any moment he was going to fall off.

  ‘Across the Pole – to the boat!’ Morning called back.

  The Pole! His gonads buzzed. In one of his seminiferous tubules, an Aubrey Paxton spermatid lay waiting to be steered into its appropriate duct. He could feel it.

  ‘The boat?’

  ‘She’s been at sea! Sverre brought her back into the Pacific, round the Getz Shelf and—’

  Her words were claimed by the gale.

  They were free! They could take the submarine, sail it into the timefolds, find places where flowers bloomed and rolling hills again wore lush mantles of grass. Free . . . Inevitably, inexorably, the psychic museum flashed through George’s brain. He saw Morning at the moment of giving birth, saw the infant’s soggy cord, its unexpectedly bountiful hair, its little hand, an arabesque of wrinkles.

  Morning pounded on the vulture’s neck. It swung its beak away from the Endurance Cliffs and toward the crest of the glacier, beyond which lay the Queen Alexandra Mountain Range and, further still, the massive polar plateau, land of ten thousand ice limbos, uncountable hummocks, and that sad, forsaken point from which the traveler has nowhere to go but north.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In Which Our Hero and His Mate Visit a Garden of Ice and One of Earthly Delights

  By nightfall the fugitives were at the Pole, a stretch of open plateau seamed against the dark sky and heaving with waves of frozen snow. Vents and antennas poked through the sasgruti, evidence of the submerged outpost known as New Amundsen-Scott Station. They hitched their teratorn to a chimney.

  Someone had left a mirror ball – the type intended to decorate a garden – at the precise endpoint of the earth’s axis. George pressed it to his stomach. Was this how a pregnancy felt?

  ‘I shall regain my fertility here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got millions of spermatids now, but unless they are pulled into my epididymis, they will never mature.’

  Morning’s shrug, her frown, the cant of her eyebrows – yes, there was certainly some skepticism in these gestures, but mainly, he felt, she was expressing curiosity. She wished him luck. Good, he thought, she’s keeping an open mind. We have no idea what wisdom the future would have brought, what breakthroughs in mushroom therapy and geomagnetic cures.

  He hugged the mirror ball tighter. His lower body trembled. Am I committing the great Unitarian sin of self-delusion? No, something was definitely occurring in his gonads, a grand-scale spermatid migration. Tendrils of light rose from the ice, forming tiny diamond-like satellites that went into orbit around the mirror ball, a thousand sparkling moons following their own reflections. He sensed his spermatids’ happiness, the joy of children being chased by an incoming tide. Onward the seedlets marched, driven by the resilient, magnetic earth. They reached the epididymis. Here they would mature, learn to whip their fine, new tails. In time, as he recalled from the biology text he had read on the sub, they would be diluted by the great fluids of the seminal vesicles – what a technician God was! – then move on to new and exciting vistas: vas deferens, urethra, vagina, cervix, ovarian duct, uterine wall. While only one of his nascent spermatozoa was destined to sire his child, the others would do their part, bumping against the ovum with their protein-degrading enzymes – knock-knock-knock-knock – thus removing the troublesome outer layers.

  Knock-knock.

  Who’s there?

  Aubrey Paxton.

  The little moons stopped in their orbits, ceased to exist, and he set the mirror ball back on the ice.

  Morning had shot two skuas with the assault rifle from her scopas suit. One corpse protruded from her backpack. The other lay across the Teratornis’s beak, and then – snap, gulp – the meal was gone, not dead long enough to suit the vulture, perhaps, but it made no complaint.

  ‘I believe I’m cured,’ George said. Spermatids were frolicking in his epididymis, home free.

  ‘You are a man of formidable ambition,’ Morning replied.

  They followed the spray of her flashlight down a sloping wooden ramp and into the heart of the station. Tunnels branched left and right from the central bore, thirty-foot trenches roofed by arching sections of corrugated steel. Turning, they found themselves amid a congestion of radio equipment and meteorological instruments. Here they plucked the skua and cooked it on the primus stove from her suit. It was gone in two minutes. Weary, numb, they pushed their cold lips together, kissed without feeling it, engaged in a bulky Antarctic hug. They slept.

  Dawn came, dark, dismal.

  ‘I have hope,’ he said.

  ‘Lazarev is fourteen hundred miles away,’ she replied.

  ‘Hope for our family.’

  Morning fired up the primus stove and began preparing coffee.

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine bringing the whole human species back,’ he said. ‘All that intermarriage – it gets messy, the genes degenerate or something. Still,’ he smiled, ‘Adam and Eve brought it off.’

  ‘I thought you were a Unitarian.’

  ‘All right, maybe it will be the last family – but it will be. Life is not nothing. Sverre can show us how to run the boat. We’ll take her out of here, away from all this ice and justice. We’ll get to someplace warm.’

  Morning poured coffee into her expressionless mouth. She harvested ice flecks from her hair.

  ‘I’d like to know what you think,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want some coffee?’

  ‘No.’

  She placed her chilled hands over the primus flame, moved them as if they were on a spit. ‘I think . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  His fianceé was at the most precise and unambiguous place on earth, yet she looked lost. ‘I think that we must get to Lazarev before we get to the Garden of Eden.’

  ‘Yes, but after Lazarev, we can try to become pregnant, and then—’

  ‘Men don’t want children, George, men want strategic options. Didn’t you lean anything at the trial?’

  ‘I want children. A child. Our child.’

  ‘You want Justine and Holly back.’

  ‘I want you and—’

  Morning hurled a fistful of skua bones against the hard snow wall, slicing off his sentence. ‘Can’t you figure anything out on your own? Must it all be explained to you? In two days we’ll be flying over Skeidshoven Mountain. Do you know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, idiot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  I do not know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, he told himself, over and over. His bullet wound had not hurt so much since its inception. I do not know . . .

  He knew. Oh, God, he knew. Damn you, Nostradamus, prince of frauds! And damn you as well, Leonardo, pa
inter of lies!

  He pulled the magic lantern slide from his breast pocket. His supposed wife smiled up at him, his alleged daughter still wore a merry face. With a quick slapping motion he rammed the glass rectangle against the floor. There was a sound like a nut encountering a nutcracker. It’s not everyone who gets to destroy a priceless Leonardo, he thought. And then his tears started, large and cold, as if an ice clock were ticking in his brain.

  Morning removed her gloves and picked up a Leonardo sliver. It contained Aubrey’s head.

  ‘What is Skeidshoven Mountain?’ George asked. He knew.

  She rested the sliver against her palm. ‘It’s where I . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Gained the continent.’

  She drew the glass across her flesh. Black blood rushed out. Clotting, it acquired the tormented contours and pinched skin of a weeping face.

  ‘On the second of May,’ she said, ‘a bright winter afternoon. I beheld my memories, and I had nothing. No children, no lovers, just a working knowlege of psychotherapy.’

  Squeezing her eyelids together, she bottled up her tears.

  Even with the frequent pauses for gulps and sighs, her story did not take long. Stowing away as the submarine left McMurdo Station . . . pretending to come aboard with Randstable . . . going to Sverre and convincing him that his prisoners were threatened with sudden mental collapse . . .

  ‘I wanted a life, George, not the dead dreams of those wretches in the limbos.’ Her tears escaped, hardening into thin bright glaciers before they could leave her face. ‘And I did it. I brought it off. You would never have loved a darkblood, but you loved me.’

  She opened her eyes. He was gone . . .

  I don’t understand the first thing about admitteds, Morning thought. I love this man, and I have no idea what matters to him.

  She ran through the maze of ice-and-steel tunnels, following the flashlight beam, chasing his crackling footfalls and the shouts that rattled off the frozen surfaces of New Amundsen-Scott Station – howls of unfathomable sadness, curses targeted against God, and, most of all, over and over, a thousand echoing demands that the universe give him a child.

  The sickness began in his spleen. Sverre could feel it corrupting the fat organ, rushing outward, pouring into his lymph, pressing toward the headwaters of his heart. He lay in his bunk for hours, days, powerless to stop the progress of his unadmittance, his mind wandering the foggy border between sleep and oblivion. His brain floated on dark, tarry fluids. Occasionally it showed him snatches of his beloved Kristin, more often an Antarctic crevasse, an ice tunnel to hell.

  It was all in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. Sverre had been the first of his race to gain the continent, and so he would be the first to lose it. Ragnarok, he thought. World’s End. He was satisfied with his new verse. It did not rhyme; poetry need not rhyme. Yea, Thor struck Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent as it shot from the sea, and the worm’s last breath did blast the god and dry his blood, and next the mortal world itself did crack, locked in endless winter. Ragnarok – when all debts fall due, all legends climax. And so, pursuant to the legend, an Antarctic storm rushed through the boat, sea dragon’s breath prying back the hatches, whooshing down the corridors, crossing Sverre’s cabin. He drew his blankets tight, but the dragon’s breath still came; it squeezed his bones and turned his gutta-percha eye into a hailstone. His ears throbbed with the detonations of Jormungandr’s heart.

  He awoke. The heart was a human fist, pounding at his cabin door.

  Rolling out of bed, he was hit by the smell of himself, flesh marinated in alcohol and sweat. Gin, he knew, and gin alone, would get him to the door. He limped to his writing desk, found the bottle, shoved its mouth home. His intoxicated hand staggered across the desk, knocking over the ink pot, scattering pages of the Saga of Thor.

  Behind the door two ghosts in scopas suits waited. They were rimmed with frost. One had an ice storm raging in its beard.

  ‘You’re out of uniform,’ Morning said, removing her helmet.

  ‘Dr Valcourt?’ He took a pull at the bottle.

  ‘From the Pole to Astrid Land by vulture in fifty-one hours,’ she said. ‘That must be a record, right? They’ll put us in National Geographic.’

  ‘Morning and I are in love,’ said George.

  ‘I know,’ said the captain.

  Sverre walked forward, tripped. George bear-hugged him, and the gin bottle clattered to the floor. It was shocking how insubstantial the captain had become, his skin like paper, his beard the color and consistency of dead seaweed. The fugitives carried him to the bed, lowered him into the Sverre-shaped mold in his mattress. He asked for his poem and some gin. While Morning gathered up the papers from the writing desk, George retrieved the bottle.

  ‘I saw the executions,’ Sverre said. ‘Tarmac refused the hood. A real four-ball general . . .’ He coughed. ‘I would like to hear the Saga of Thor.’

  Morning read the captain his poem.

  ‘That’s not bad, is it?’ said Sverre.

  ‘You would have been one heck of an epitaph writer,’ answered George.

  ‘Be honest now – is it any good?’

  ‘In your time you became a poet,’ Morning replied.

  George lifted the white raven from Sverre’s writing desk, smoothed its alabaster feathers. Holly would have named it Birdie. ‘Sir, you’ve made certain efforts on my behalf,’ he said stiffly, ‘and I appreciate them.’

  ‘Your name should never have been in the indictment, Paxton.’ Sverre grinned, showing teeth that resembled Indian corn. ‘Be fruitful and multiply – both of you.’

  Morning fired an unambiguous glance toward George: leave him his illusions. ‘My dear Lieutenant Commander Sverre,’ she said, ‘may I assume that you never mustered yourself out of the Navy? Are you still captain of the City of New York?’

  The dying man could not stand, and so he sat on the altar, boots dangling against the silk antependium. At one time his voice could have filled the whole chapel, rocking it as would a hellfire sermon from Reverend Sparrow, but now the engaged couple had to lean forward to catch his words.

  ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of . . . whatever.’ A cough attacked, spinning him around. He flailed at the air, smacked his hand against a candlestick, sent it toppling. ‘Something, something. To join together this man and this woman in . . . something. Holy matrimony. Consecrated fornication. Something.’

  He took the gin bottle from his coat and drank.

  ‘Do you, Morning Valcourt, take this man to be your lawfully wedded wife . . . husband . . . to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse . . . something . . . for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish . . . all that. . . till death do you part?’

  ‘I do.’

  He coughed, and black blood came up.

  ‘And do you, George Paxton, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, come locusts . . . gammas rays . . . come . . . never mind. Do you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Forasmuch as you have consented together in wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and the captain of this ship, I now pronounce you husband and wife.’

  Husband and wife kissed. Their scopas suits came together, separating a few seconds later with a loud, rubbery skluck.

  When Sverre smiled, black blood spilled over his teeth. ‘Tell your children to respect the Navy.’ He collapsed on the altar, muttered, ‘Look – she’s never been clearer. Look at Kristin, would you, flying up and down on that roller coaster, up and down, so . . . clear . . .’

  They laid him out, opened his claw-hammer coat. Like an abused onion Sverre lost his layers, skin, muscle, viscera, veins, nerves, all sloughing from his bones, and then there was dust, and then there was nothing, nothing at all save a solitary gutta-percha eye.

  The newlyweds gathered Sverre’s vacant coat into a bundle, brought it on deck, tos
sed it over the side. An ice floe slapped against the coat, pounding it into the depths of the bay. A flock of penguins watched from their rookeries. Dressed in their finest tuxedos, they had come for a wedding, only to find it superseded by a funeral. They stood dutifully on the cliffs, solemn as professional mourners, until the vulture came and, with fearsome squawks and a tumultuous beating of its wings, chased them away. It was the last George ever saw of the great unextinct beast, his feathered co-defendant, freak, fluke, ender of the world. Exhausted, famished – they had not known deep sleep or a true meal in two days – husband and wife returned to their bower. They went to the galley, a wonderland of kettles, and prepared their wedding feast, eating it on the spot. Apples and pears disappeared into ravenous mouths. Turkey drumsticks were consumed half raw. Corn went down frozen. They devoured their wedding cake in batter form.

  Staggering into the corridor, the happy couple realized that they were over a hundred yards from any cabin. They looked at each other. A hundred yards, a hundred miles – no difference. They dropped to the floor and nuzzled. Like a lizard abandoning its skin, George slipped out of his scopas suit. He heard a grinding noise – snores, yes, but these were the snores of Morning Valcourt, hence, pleasing snores, subtle, intelligent. Quietly he studied his new wife, this great unadmitted psychotherapist, this brilliant vulture pilot, gleaning endless delight from her freckled, ice-scarred, beautiful, sleeping face . . .

  When he awoke, the world had become an erotic film, the rug soft, the corridor warm, sweat accumulating inside his underwear like sweet balm, and there she was, freshly showered and dressed in silk pajamas emblazoned with the anchor insignia of the United States Navy, displaying herself in a provocative low-angle shot, offering a wet hand. He jumped to his feet and followed her down the corridor, glorying in the fragrance of her soggy hair, his erection moving before him like a bowsprit. He shivered with the hair-trigger sexuality of adolescence. Outside the executive officer’s cabin she kissed him with awkward desire.