This is the Way the World Ends (38 page)

‘
Please
don’t go, Holly!
Please
!’

‘Good-bye, Daddy. I love you.’

‘Good-bye, darling. I love you so much. I love you so much.’

She worked free of his grip, coasted bum-down along the hull as if it were a sliding board. Her stovepipe hat fell off. Now George could hear snow crunching under her little boots. The starlight caught her golden suit, so that a figure made of phosphor moved across the barrier toward Lazarev. She clutched Birdie tighter, ran faster, and was soon swallowed by the darkness and the gale.

Vanity of vanities. George had actually believed he could save his species. And yet, despite the scale of his failure, he had not reverted to his old, unambitious ways. He expected things now. God owed him. Tirelessly, enterprisingly, he dashed across the Lazarev Ice Shelf. I’ll go to whomever Morning made that deal with, he thought. They’ll let me keep my child. They must.

His lantern was strong, more than equal to an Antarctic blizzard, and he had no trouble keeping Holly in view. She was only four, and unsteady, and burdened with a scopas suit and Birdie. He called her name. The wind threw it back in his face. Bits of ice sailed past, pelting his forehead, slicing his cheeks. He wished that he were unadmitted, so that his memories would be fogged, but instead the images all boasted a brutal clarity: Holly’s first trip to the zoo, Holly being a bug for Halloween . . .

The crevasses of Antarctica are predatory, hungry, lying in wait. Holly did not notice the great Novolazarevkaya Crevasse. One second she was running, the next she was gone, falling in a flash of golden scopas threads.

George cursed the crevasse aloud, vowing to defeat it as totally as Sverre’s navy had defeated the invalidated past. Already he was at the brink, throwing himself on his stomach, extending his lantern arm. The beam spilled downward, illuminating flying whorls of snow and a child’s figure pressed against the wall, her boots frozen to a feeble lip of ice. George saw two frightened green eyes, heard whimpering. His muscles and tendons creaked, nearly tearing apart as he fought for an extra inch of reach.

The tomb inscriber proved stronger than himself. He touched something soft, seized it. He yanked. Her silk-wrapped hand came forward, safe in his, but it was strangely, horribly weightless.

‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way!’ a voice shouted from out of the storm.

George stared at the awful object he was holding. The wrist was cut. A plastic tube poked through the crack. At the fractured elbow, ball bearings and copper wire protruded. The stump of the upper arm was a fountain of yellow hydraulic fluids; the technological blood gushed from rubber veins, spilled around steel bones, and dripped onto the Lazarev Ice Shelf.

Dressed in his diamond-patterned scopas suit, Theophilus Carter ambled into view. Icicles grew from his nostrils like tusks and drooped from the inside brim of his top hat like crystalline hair. His gloves were stuck to a teapot. In the murky distance, the lights of his itinerant shop (‘Remarkable Things for Human Bodies’) burned through the blizzard.

Again Theophilus said, ‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way . . .’

George hurled the puppet arm into the dark whistling pit, and when Holly’s double looked up at him he lost consciousness and collapsed on the ice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In Which Our Hero Crowns a Madman, Carves an Epitaph, and Sees a Constellation

Smells cut through his brain, forcing him into the world. Formaldehyde. Viscera. How different from the odorless continent, how different from the prophylactic
City of New York
. He was pleased to find himself on the MAD Hatter’s hospital gurney. Good. He’s planning to take me apart. He’s going to stuff me with circuits and pumps. I’ll become Plato or Julius Caesar or George Washington.

Like a speeding subway car, the laboratory vibrated and lurched, winds spurting through the cracks in its walls. The organs trembled in their jars, the severed arms bumped against the walls of their tanks, and the skeletons flounced on their ceiling hooks like chandeliers of bone.

Airborne.

The Hatter waddled over with a tea tray. He had shed his scopas suit, leaving himself attired in his morning coat and vest.

George tried to speak, but his vocal cords were iced up. He poured himself tea, drank. ‘I had no idea there was such cruelty in the world.’

‘Strange words from a convicted war criminal. Your loving bride wanted to give you a day of happiness, that’s all. We calculated we could sustain the drama for twelve hours. Call it cruelty if you like, deception, a ruse, though a ruse by any other name would smell as sweet. I call it a gift.’

‘She said she had made a
deal
,’ George protested.

‘With whom? Extinction? Stop living in a dream world. You can’t make deals with extinction – I told you that back in the city. The deal was with yours truly. Your bride gave me some free therapy, so I gave her a free automaton. The therapy proved useless, as we knew it would. Assured destruction is a hopeless disease.’

Rising from the gurney – his neck was stiff from Holly’s horsey ride – George followed the Hatter out of the laboratory and into the shop. A pile of scopas suit sales contracts lay on the counter. The mannequins’ shoulders pushed through their rotting costumes like cantaloupes tearing through grocery bags. The two men walked to the bellied window, leaned toward its congestion of hats. Theophilus traded his top hat for a bejeweled crown. George put on a homburg and stared at the birdless sky. Dark, bloated clouds floated by like plumes from the stacks of a weapons factory.

‘Ever since the war,’ said the Hatter, ‘your child has been a lot of random molecules. You knew that. You always knew that. All the King’s accountants and all the King’s lawyers couldn’t put . . . so I built her from scratch. Your wife gave me a nursery school photograph plus relevant data. The Big Dipper, everything. I programmed the reunion well,
n’est-ce pas
?’

The shop began to roll and pitch. The mannequins flapped their arms. Frantic tintinnabulations arose from the bells over the door.

‘Admit it, things went swimmingly,’ said the Hatter. ‘A bit mawkish for my tastes – yours, too, probably – but on the whole, swimmingly.’

George noticed how cadaverous Professor Carter had become. His pink hair was almost white, and his skin looked like stale cheese. The four-in-hand tie surrounded a neck as narrow and coarse as a loaf of French bread. Only one of his rabbit teeth remained, and it was black and cracked.

Stripping himself naked, the Hatter went to a mannequin dressed in royal regalia. ‘Help me with this, will you?’

Together they hauled down the coronation mantle, which was as heavy and bulky as an Oriental rug, and placed it around Theophilus’s tiny shoulders. Immediately he toppled under the weight. His crown fell off. ‘When you’re a king,’ he gasped, propping himself up on one elbow, ‘people are less likely to notice that you’re insane.’ Through a miracle of effort, he got into a sitting position. ‘One more favor.’ He petted the ermine on his capelet. ‘Crown me.’

George lowered the wonderful sparkling hat over Theophilus’s dead hair. ‘How do I look?’ the Hatter asked.

‘Splendid.’

He really did, in a way.

‘Off with their heads! Bring on the dancing girls! Turn away those petitioners! Maximize those strategic options!’

For nearly an hour he sat in the corner, raving quietly. George brought him tea.

‘Enhance that deterrence! Put Humpty-Dumpty together again! Let them eat cake!’

He motioned George over with his scepter. The tomb inscriber bent low. ‘
Au revoir
, my friend.’ The Hatter drank tea. ‘The odds, however, are against it.’

And then, slowly, graciously, as the shop settled onto the ground, Good King Theophilus began his long reign over nothing.

George stepped through the door. He held his lantern high. More immortal than Egypt’s pyramids, the Ice Palace of Justice rose against the verbose slopes of Mount Christchurch, pennants shivering, spires skewering black clouds.
JUSTICE IS SERVED
, the mountain said.

There was no storm here, only a mournful wind bearing the smoky odor of scopas suit insulation. Everywhere he glanced, from the bellied shop window to the limits of his light and beyond, the suits covered the glacial tongue like cocoons abandoned by some huge and over-propagated species of moth. He wanted to have some really profound response to the situation but could not manage it. So, he thought, this is it: no more people, not a one, no admitteds, no unadmitteds, nobody. My, my.

But then, growling mechanically, a Sno-Cat emerged from the gloom, stopping before the Mad Tea Party. An old woman got out, one arm bowed around her scopas suit helmet, the other gripping a cane made of ice. She scuttled forward.

‘Hello, George.’

‘Mrs Covington?’

‘This foolish glacier is almost as cold as your monument works.’ Bands of snow flashed through Nadine’s gray hair.

‘It’s good to see you again, ma’am.’ Despite the cold, the waves of well-being managed to reach him. ‘I was certain your little sailboat would be swamped.’

‘The documents barge picked me up.’

‘You saw the trial?’

‘I caught your part. Don’t worry, George, nothing you could have said would have changed the verdict . . . So, tell me, did Leonardo’s painting predict the future?’

‘I saw my daughter again.’ He fixed on the dark effluvium coming from the Cat’s tailpipe. ‘But it wasn’t her – it just seemed like her. You shouldn’t have raised my hopes.’

‘
You
raised your hopes.’

‘I went to that marble city like you said I should, and I found Professor Carter, and he made me fertile, and it didn’t matter.’

‘That’s the way things go in these post-exchange environments. Remember the good old days, when you wrote those epitaphs for me in Massachusetts? “She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here,” right?’ She pointed her ice cane toward the Cat. ‘It’s warm in the cab, and we have work to do.’

They drove past a dozen deserted ice limbos and ten thousand bereft scopas suits. Once the Cat was atop the glacial tongue, Nadine headed for the eastern face of the nunatak and drove up the slope. Five ice-sealed corpses swung on their living gibbets.

The Cat stopped before Brat Tarmac’s remains. Drops of frozen blood hung from his bullet wounds like tears leaving blind eyes. George climbed to the roof, a hacksaw wrapped tightly in his glove. He peeled off the belt that held the general’s man-portable thermonuclear device, buckled it around his own waist. He went to work on the cable. The grinning blade groaned and shrieked. Brat tumbled to the roof. George laid him out carefully, as he had seen them do with the deceased at the Montefiore Funeral Home.

Nadine drove to the next tree. Overwhite’s beard was a fretwork of icicles and frost. George sawed him down.

Then Randstable. Sparrow. Wengernook, who looked nervous even in death.

After stacking the heavy, rigid bodies in the back of the Cat, he returned to Sparrow’s tree. Had his eyes tricked him? No, there it was, a little Bible, frozen solid. He picked it up.

Latitude: 79 degrees 38 minutes south.

Longitude: 169 degrees 15 minutes east.

Pushing up from the ice was a stone reminiscent of the megalith George had inspected at the Snape’s Hill Burial Grounds. On this spot, only eleven miles from supplies, Robert Falcon Scott had perished after failing to become the first human to reach the South Pole.

The inscribed monument left George with the impression that Scott felt worse about being bettered by a Norwegian than he did about starving to death.

‘Of course, he might just as easily have been born the Norwegian and Amundsen the Britisher,’ said Nadine, ‘in which case Scott would have been
glad
that Amundsen won.’

‘Not if Scott was Norwegian, no.’

‘Why?’

‘Because then a
Britisher
would have won.’

‘I don’t understand.’

A pick swayed from the rear door of the Cat. George assaulted the Ross Ice Shelf. Sub-zero winds bore away the sound of metal striking ice; white sparks shot into the air. Gradually the pit expanded until it was large enough to admit all five bodies. With Nadine’s help he lowered his friends into the darkness. ‘Do you hate them?’ he asked.

‘I hate their bad ideas,’ she replied.

‘We should say a few words.’

‘Go ahead.’

For ten minutes George struggled with the frozen Bible. Trying to open it was like trying to rip granite. At last he made a fissure slightly beyond the middle – on Ecclesiastes, a set of existential essays that had been included in the Bible by mistake. It was a favorite with Unitarians. Poor Reverend Sparrow would no doubt have preferred something more tumultuous – Ezekiel, Zephaniah, the Revelation – but this would have to do.

‘Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard,’ George read. ‘Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good,’ he continued. ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the perfumer to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly outweigh wisdom and honor,’ he concluded.

‘That was very nice,’ said Nadine.

The tomb inscriber climbed into the grave, unzipped Reverend Sparrow’s suit, and placed the splayed book against his heart.

Once George was back on the surface, they filled in the hole with ice and snow, Nadine all the while reminiscing aloud about her husband Nathaniel, each nugget of memory receiving detailed review, Nathaniel Covington the poet, Nathaniel Covington the great lover.

From the Cat’s tool box the old woman procured a hammer and a chisel. It took George an hour to wipe the Scott Monument clean. Nadine held the lantern steady as he laid down his guidelines with chalk. Tongue pressed firmly against his mustache, he began to ply his trade.

The hammer pounded. The chisel danced.

He did a fine, professional job – Nadine said so. The characters all had serifs.