James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘Then we’d better get on with it.’

‘Take her out?’

‘Take her out.’

‘All engines ahead full?’

‘All engines ahead full.’

‘Set course for McMurdo Station?’

‘Set course for McMurdo Station.’

Harsh winds descended. The morning grew dark. The shadowed ship heaved up and down, back and forth, eager for the open South Atlantic. Sverre crossed the swamp at a funereal pace, drinking, coughing, shuddering from the cold in his rubber eye, cautiously picking his way through the invalidated past.

‘…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…’

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.