James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘Mercy! A discontinuity!’ gasped Randstable, pulling a pocket calculator from his vest.

‘You mean it’s a trick?’ said George.

‘Trick? No – a quantum aberration.’ Randstable stroked the little keyboard. ‘Normally such things happen only at the subatomic level, when your pions and antineutrinos and so on burst out of nothing as vacuum fluctuations.’ A string of zeros appeared on the display screen. ‘In the macroworld, where you have your people and so on, the expected frequency of such an event is very, very low – just shy of zero, in fact.’

The captain told of his locked-out race. He took his guests back to the time of the materializations, bade them see the Antarctic glaciers gestate men, women, and children, each scheduled to gain the continent at the high point of his would-be life, the time of greatest fulfillment and promise.

‘Watch us rise through the ice, crack into the frigid dawn, rub the snow from our eyes, stretch our hypothetical limbs. My parents were killed in the Battle of Washington exactly two weeks before they would have conceived me. I would have gone to Annapolis. I would have served my country with honor and distinction. I would have—’

Bypassing the goblet, Sverre drank directly from the bottle.

‘Do you know what our outrage was worth? A year. A year is nothing, gentlemen. Half my life is already gone. I can tell you how many hours I have left. How many minutes.’

Faces jumped into George’s brain. Nadine Covington. Theophilus Carter. Ensign Peach. Darkbloods all.

Morning Valcourt.

Was she one of them? Was Aubrey’s mother a woman from the future?

‘If unadmitted, you must use your sojourn well,’ said Sverre. ‘A year is nothing.’

First priority – get warm. And so you become pirates, plundering the scopas suit barges on their transpacific crossings.

‘Such attire is excellent for keeping out the cold,’ the captain explained.

A year. Nothing. You cannot raise a family in a year. You cannot forge a great republic. But you can, with luck, after making appropriate political arrangements, track down certain key individuals and call them to account. So you build a courthouse. Judge’s bench. Witness stand. Prisoner’s dock. A Multiprong submarine lies at the bottom of McMurdo Sound. Unadmitted Navy frogmen bring her up. You set sail. You snatch six men from the jaws of the holocaust. You want more – President Orlaff, Senator Krogh, the Secretary of the Navy, the National Security Advisor – but they are already dead.

‘Courthouse?’ Brat tried to eat a forkful of German chocolate cake, failed. ‘Is that what he said?’

‘Courthouse,’ muttered Randstable.

‘We want admittance,’ said Sverre. ‘Instead we must settle for knowledge. You will tell us why this war was necessary. Consider how fortunate you are. We could have left you to the flames, as we elected to do with them . The others. Their gimcrack Party, their bankrupt Marxism, their outrageous pretensions – all blessedly extinct. You, by contrast, are ambiguous. You don’t add up. It was your ambiguousness that saved you, that alone.’

George had never thought of himself as being ambiguous.

‘Surely you don’t presume to lay this tragedy at our feet,’ grumbled Overwhite. ‘We did everything in our power to prevent—’

‘Er, wait a minute, Brian,’ said Randstable. ‘Surely they do presume to lay this tragedy at our feet. I mean, when you consider that the alternative is… you know. The extinction loop.’

‘You have no jurisdiction over us,’ said Wengernook. ‘Zero. None. Nada .’

A new voice said, ‘I’m afraid that’s not true.’

Sverre’s table companion was standing. ‘The McMurdo Sound Agreement charters an International Military and Civilian Tribunal,’ asserted the young man as he devoured a glob of lemon meringue pie. ‘The first appendix lists the counts against you. Have no fear – we shall challenge the competence of the court as soon as the trial begins.’

George’s appetite for dessert, a primary drive not long ago, was completely gone. Counts against us? Trial? All because of some ridiculous sales contract?

‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Brat.

‘Your advocate. Martin Bonenfant, unadmitted counsel for the defense. My staff and I have been hired to argue your case before the judges. I strongly recommend that you retain us.’

‘We don’t need a goddamn lawyer,’ asserted Wengernook.

Bonenfant raked his fingers through his glossy black hair. ‘Yes, you do – though your case is much better than you might suppose. We’ve been researching your enemy’s morals, as well as the many imaginative ways you sought to prevent mutual destruction. Do you realize that the Soviets violated the spirit and at times the letter of both STABLE agreements?’ He devoured more lemon meringue pie. ‘And if all else fails, I’ve got a rabbit or two in my hat. I believe we should go for acquittals, count by count.’

He’s so young, George thought. They sent a child to defend us.

‘Yes, an acquittal strategy is certainly the way to play this one,’ muttered Randstable. Turning, he solicited his co-defendants with large, clumsy gestures. ‘Let me put it this way. A photon that doesn’t exist can borrow energy from the uncertainty relation to make a real positron-electron pair, which annihilates to produce the photon that created it in the first place.’

‘Sounds like witchcraft,’ said Sparrow.

‘No,’ said Randstable. ‘Physics.’

Slowly, anxiously, Bonenfant licked lemon muck from his lips. For the unadmitted, evidently, there was urgency in every pleasure. He explained that, if let upon the earth, he would have been a civil liberties lawyer living in Philadelphia. He would have defended child murderers and neo-Nazis.

George stood up. ‘I would like to assert here and now that I am—’

The event that kept him from saying ‘innocent,’ stopping his tongue as abruptly as an arrow stops a bird in flight, was the sudden arrival of the City of New York ’s officers and men. Lieutenant Grass, Ensign Peach, Ensign Cobb, Lieutenant Brust, Chief Petty Officer Rush – and over two hundred others. Down the spiral staircase they came, straight into the main mess hall, a roiling mob.

Snatching steak knives from the banquet table, the front-line officers slashed themselves, then passed the knives to the waiting sailors. Chandelier light sparkled in the black rivers. Clouds of burning sulphur rolled through the mess hall. Unadmitted blood filled the wine glasses and frosted the desserts; it speckled Wengernook’s brow, splattered Sparrow’s hair, rushed down Randstable’s cheeks, matted Overwhite’s beard, stuck to Brat’s hands, pooled in George’s lap.

‘Admit us!’ cried the nullified descendants. ‘Let us in!’

A swamp of blood collected in the center of the table. It swirled and bubbled, spitting out ashes. As Peach and Cobb gestured toward the vortex, something took form – an ebony sculpture rising awkwardly from the ghostly tissues.

A model scaffold. A miniature noose. A little hanging corpse – a doll two feet long, its face a blob, its tongue lolling on black lips. Slowly, drippingly, like a reverse-motion film of a melting figurine, features emerged, eyes, nose, mouth.

George reached into his pocket and drew out his Leonardo. This family is mine, he told himself. No canceled generations can take it from me.

‘Count One – Crimes Against Peace!’ screamed Peach.

‘Count Two – War Crimes!’ screamed Cobb.

‘Count Three – Crimes Against Humanity!’

‘Count Four – Crimes Against the Future!’

The sculpted corpse had acquired Wengernook’s face. It wept tears of ink.