James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

Has Bonenfant’s team found that vulture expert? asked George’s spermatids. I don’t know, he told them.

‘Learned justices, you are about to write a verdict in the case. Your opinion will be the final chapter in human history. It will matter. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to speculate that, beyond our solar system, another intelligent species monitors this trial, seeking to learn what nuclear weapons are good for. And so I urge you to fill your pens with your black blood and tell these celestial eavesdroppers that the harvest of nuclear weapons is threefold – spiritual degeneration, self-delusion, and death. Perhaps we should bury your verdict in a capsule beneath the Antarctic ice, so that one day, a year or ten years or a century from now, some wayfarer in the Milky Way might find it and know that, for all our love of violence, at the final moment we were able to say no to fusion bombs and yes to life.’

‘Does he make up this crap himself?’ said Brat.

‘All the greeting card writers are dead,’ said Wengernook.

‘Shut up,’ said George.

‘While we cannot know for certain to whom your verdict will speak,’ said Aquinas, ‘we do know for whom it will speak. It will speak for the thousands who sit in this courtroom and for the multitudes who wait on the glacier. It will speak for history – for those who struggled to make this planet a repository of art and learning, and whose achievements have now been laid waste. And it will speak for a population who, in our self-pity as unadmitteds, we sometimes forget. I refer to the five billion men, women, and children who were blasted and burned alive, irradiated and crushed, suffocated and starved and sickened unto death in the recent holocaust.

‘Their blood cries to heaven, but their voice cannot be heard.

‘Give them a voice, your Honors. Give them a voice.’

AQUINAS DELIVERS ELEGY FOR HUMAN RACE, said Mount Christ-church that afternoon.

‘The tribunal will hear the closing argument of the defense,’ said Justice Jefferson.

George noticed how barren Bonenfant’s table had become – Dennie gone, Parkman gone, all of the papers gone save one.

‘Remember what he said on the boat,’ muttered Brat. ‘He’s got a rabbit or two in the hat.’

‘I’ll take two,’ said Wengernook.

‘A boy rabbit and a girl rabbit,’ said Randstable.

‘Honored justices,’ Bonenfant began, ‘I submit that, beyond the ornate pieties of my learned opponent, the issue you must decide is simple. Did these six men aim to wage a war or to preserve a peace? Their aim, we have seen, was peace. Indeed, no firmer fact has emerged from this long inquest.

‘Lest we forget, my clients did not ask to have thermonuclear weapons at their disposal. They did not want to inherit a world that knew these obscene devices. But inherit it they did, along with the threat to freedom posed by Russian Communism. I ask you, learned judges, would any of you have acted differently in their place?

‘We all know that the peace was not preserved. During this hearing the mechanism of peace-preservation – the policy of deterrence through strategic balance – has been characterized as self-defeating. In his cross-examination of Robert Wengernook, the prosecutor even went so far as to suggest that my clients pursued deterrence so vigorously that they forced the Soviet Union into the suicidal action of striking first – and with second-strike weapons, no less.

‘Now that is a most improbable scenario. Crazy. Fantastic. Weird… Indeed, it simply did not happen that way. I can prove as much .’

Gasps rushed through the courtroom like a thousand icy breezes. The Mount Christchurch reporters leaned over the balustrade of the press box.

‘At this point in the hearing it would be most peculiar were I to put anyone else on the stand. And yet, your Honors, that is what I now propose to do. For there is a seventh defendant in this case – a defendant who should have stood trial in place of my clients.’

The gasps faded into the rumble of the question What? in fifty languages.

‘Legal proceedings against animals have a long history. Plato’s The Laws includes the directive that “if a beast of burden shall kill anyone, the relatives of the deceased shall prosecute it for murder.” The Book of Exodus tells us that “when an ox gores a man to death, the ox must be stoned.” However, until today no one has indicted the animal that my assistants will now bring forward.’

A loud, high skreeee filled the courtroom – the shrill protestations of wheels turning on axles. Dennie and Parkman were pouring all of their youthful, unadmitted energy into pushing a large wooden cart toward the bench.

On the cart was a metal cage.

In the cage was a gigantic vulture.

‘The first day of the war found me on a vulture hunt,’ Bonenfant explained, ‘chasing this creature from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts. I captured it not far from George Paxton’s hometown and then made my rendezvous with the City of New York .’

Aquinas boiled over like neglected oatmeal on a hot stove. ‘Your Honors, this is a courtroom, not a zoo! Whatever relevance Mr Bonenfant’s fat bird may have – and I see none – its arrival comes much too late to be considered admissible.’

‘I beg the court’s indulgence,’ said Bonenfant, gently lifting the solitary document from the defense table and handing it to Dennie. ‘Two days ago my chief assistant began an arduous trek up the glacier. She was searching for someone. This morning she found him. Your Honors, the defense is pleased to offer the deposition of one Dr Laslo Prendergorst – resident of Ice Limbo 905, unadmitted ornithologist, hypothetical Nobel laureate, and Antarctica’s most illustrious vulture expert.’

‘We didn’t have time to copy it,’ said Dennie, placing the document before Justice Jefferson.

‘Dr Prendergorst has examined the specimen in question,’ said Bonenfant, ‘and he has confirmed our suspicions. During the late Pleistocene era, a swift-flying, migratory species of vulture inhabited North America – the Teratornis , one form of which, Argentavis magnificens , was the largest bird ever to have lived. Twentieth-century scientists assumed that all the teratorns, including the gargantuan Argentavis magnificens , were extinct. The scientists were wrong. A small breeding population of Argentavis survived. In his deposition Dr Prendergorst draws an analogy with a fish called the coelacanth, believed to have vanished during the Cretaceous period. In 1938 a live coelacanth was found off the southern coast of Africa. Rumors of its extinction had been greatly exaggerated.’

Justice Wojciechowski smiled. The teratorn chewed the cage bars with its steam-shovel beak, shook them with its chipped and twisted claws.

When Bonenfant snapped his fingers, Parkman pulled some papers from the chief counsel’s briefcase and delivered them to the judges.

‘Your Honors, we are now offering a fresh copy of the prosecution’s own Document 318, a NORAD computer printout indicating the sizes, velocities, radar signatures, and trajectories of the objects that triggered this war. Were these objects heading across Canada on a line with Washington? Yes. Were they shaped like Soviet Spitball cruise missiles? Yes.

‘But’ – Bonenfant paused, weaving his hand through the air as if it were in flight – ‘were they Soviet Spitball cruise missiles?

‘ No ! They were a flock of admittedly hideous but completely unarmed vultures pursuing their annual one-day migration from Newfoundland to the Yucatan Peninsula. If you doubt my claim, turn to the last page. You will see one of the satellite photographs taken to corroborate the NORAD sighting. This is not a cruise missile, your Honors. You can even see the bloodstains on its beak.’