This is the Way the World Ends (21 page)

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 client 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.

‘We have ninety percent of the world’s ice here,’ said Dimitri later that afternoon, ‘See that glacier? Mulock. My place of birth.’

‘Birth?’ said George.

‘It was a birth to
me
, Paxton. Being dust and then suddenly getting a body and thoughts and cracking out of the ice, well, maybe it wasn’t snuggly blankets and my own private tit, but, by damn, it was something.’

On the outskirts of Ice Limbo 415 a scopas-suited Bulgarian ballerina danced. Despite her attire she was quite graceful, and her face displayed the sort of intellectual frown that George had so often seen and admired on Morning Valcourt. Morning is doing something at this very moment, he realized. Something ordinary? Sleeping? Eating? More likely – something profound. She is musing profoundly about Leonardo’s vulture fantasy . . .

Between Limbos 416 and 417 a Norwegian man with a fishing pole and a hacksaw tried to cut a hole in the ice. A flock of penguins ambled into view. Antarctica, Dimitri explained, held the planet’s one remaining ecosystem, a dystopia of birds and aquatic mammals awaiting the inevitable hour. George was endlessly saddened by the penguins’ trusting faces, their stuffedanimal cuteness, their utter obliviousness to the imminence of the bird who is like a writing desk.

‘Hey, Paxton, maybe you can settle an argument,’ said Dimitri. ‘I would have been Greek, okay? That means I would have hated all other Greeks, right?’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ laughed Gila Guizot. ‘That’s completely backwards. You would have hated non-Greeks.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Dimitri.

‘Take me, I would have been French,’ said Gila. ‘Also a Catholic.’

‘And proud of it,’ explained George.

‘Proud of French Catholics?’ asked Dimitri.

‘Proud to
be
a French Catholic,’ George answered patiently.

‘There, you see?’ said Gila. ‘I was right.’

‘What did she have to do to become a French Catholic?’ asked Dimitri.

‘Her parents would have been French Catholics,’ said George.

‘I seem to recall something about Protestants,’ said Dimitri. ‘She would have been proud of Protestants, too, right?’

‘She would have been proud to
be
a Protestant,’ said George. ‘If she had been one, that is.’

‘She would have been just a Catholic? Not a Protestant too?’

‘You were never both!’

‘Why not?’

‘You just weren’t,’ said George.

‘Too bad – she could have been even prouder,’ said Dimitri.

‘If she was both, I think she would have been less proud.’

‘Don’t mock me, Paxton.’

‘What are you?’ asked Gila.

‘A Unitarian,’ said George.

‘You were the ones who hated Jews – did I remember that right?’ asked Gila.

‘No,’ said George.

‘Muslims?’

‘No.’

‘Paxton is proud of
everybody
,’ said Dimitri knowingly.

Night came but not darkness, only the perpetual gloom of the late Antarctic summer. George dreamed of spermatids reaching epididymides and growing fine, strong tails.

At dawn the caravan began crossing the foot of the Nimrod Glacier, a river of ice gushing motionlessly from the interior plateau to the shelf. The warped and crevassed surface of the glacial tongue spread toward a promontory called Mount Christ-church, at the bottom of which sat a building made of the forever-frozen material known locally as Antarctic steel.

‘The Ice Palace of Justice,’ said Gila, pointing. It was a soaring, gaudy structure whose various intricacies – buttressed walls, bas-relief towers, decorous gates – seemed to disguise a sinister agenda, like the peppermint trim on a witch’s house. ‘Your new home.’

‘I’m hoping to see the South Pole,’ said George.

‘This place is
much
more interesting than the South Pole,’ said Dimitri.

‘I need to get there.’

‘The South Pole is over five hundred miles from here. Between the lack of public transportation and the fact that we intend to hang you soon, you’ll have to settle for the Ice Palace of Justice.’

The caravan slithered into the central courtyard. Dimitri twisted the ignition key; the Cat’s engine sputtered and died. As Gila dragged George into the frigid air, the wind tore nails of ice from the palace walls and flung them against his suit. The demonstrators waved their signs and brandished their frozen eggs. George and his co-defendants came together in a shivering, forlorn huddle. Wengernook glowered. Randstable hugged his magnetic chess set. Overwhite examined himself for neck tumors. Reverend Sparrow spoke with God. Even the bulk of his scopas suit could not keep Brat from looking pathologically underweight.

Police officers held back the demonstrators. The ground vibrated with angry shouts and the pounding of banner poles.
NO MERCY FOR SPECIES KILLERS
. George had never seen that one before.
EXTINGUISH THE EXTINCTIONISTS
. Nor that one. He longed for the witness stand – longed for it, feared it. Anybody would have signed that contract.

A rock-hard little man came forward brandishing a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement. The emblem on his scopas suit declared that he was a captain in the Antarctic Corps of Guards, and his nameplate said
JUAN RAMOS
. Silence settled, as if the lights were dimming in a crowded concert hall.

A conversation drifted into George’s ear.