James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘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 fire 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.’