James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

When the clock’s lower chamber was half full, so that barely ten thousand drops divided George from the scaffold, another visitor arrived, a person to whom he was certain he had nothing more to say.

The trial had aged Bonenfant, wrinkled him. It was as if his face had been painted on a balloon, and now the air was leaking out. ‘Justice has miscarried,’ he announced. Zags of white cut through his black hair. ‘No – worse. Justice has suffered a backalley abortion. We’ve made all the appropriate appeals, of course.’

‘Hopeless, right?’

‘I thought you’d get a fair trial, I really did. The judges simply couldn’t see that most nuclear wars don’t end this way. All that high-flying talk about impartiality, and they never once stopped being darkbloods. I’m sorry, George. My best wasn’t good enough.’

‘See this?’ George removed the glass painting from the nightstand, held it before Bonenfant. ‘An original Leonardo.’

‘Hmm?’ The advocate examined the slide from several different distances. ‘Impressive. So much detail in such a small space.’ His voice was redolent of rusty hinges. ‘Looks a bit like you and Dr Valcourt, doesn’t it? Leonardo, you said?’

‘Following orders from that famous liar and charlatan, Nostradamus.’

Bonenfant paced around the cell, a subtle limp in his gait, a minor stoop in his posture. ‘The tribunal wonders whether you have any final requests,’ he said.

George cast a weary eye on the ice clock. ‘I would like my family back, my planet restored, and my execution postponed fifty years.’

Bonenfant forced a laugh. When you are about to be hanged, George concluded, you get laughs for your jokes.

‘Tarmac asked for a soldier’s death.’ The advocate enacted a guard raising a rifle. ‘Firing squad.’

‘I’ve heard that your bowels let go when they hang you,’ said George.

‘Request denied.’

‘Poor bastard.’

‘But they did grant his other wish – he’ll be hanged with that man-portable thermonuclear device in his holster. Defused. He told Jefferson, “I still believe that armed missiles served the cause of world peace, and I would be a hypocrite to reject them in my hour of adversity.”’ Bonenfant pulled a sealed envelope from the hip pocket of his scopas suit. ‘This is for you.’

George tore off his gloves, clawed at the envelope with frozen fingernails. A scrap of paper fell out.

Dearest Darling,

Some things are too painful.

Human extinction.

Reunion with the man I love on the eve of his execution.

Do you hate me for not coming? I thought of the things we would try saying to each other, and it was unendurable. I shall not abandon you. I shall join you at the end. There is no justice. Forgive me.

Bonenfant touched the ice clock, failed to staunch its flow. ‘You’re quite a celebrity, George – do you realize that? People are saying your case should never have come to trial. They know you’re being hanged for symbolic reasons. Cold comfort, I guess, but—’

‘I would like you to leave now.’

With more violence than he had ever brought to anything in his life, George shredded Morning’s letter.

‘Bad news?’

‘I said you should leave.’

‘I found a Presbyterian minister for Overwhite. I could try to get you a Unitarian.’

‘Mr Bonenfant, in ten seconds I am going to strangle you to death, and my sympathizers out there will realize that I am not so symbolic after all.’

George looked at the ice clock and saw that the lower chamber was two-thirds full. The slam of the cell door dislodged a particularly large and malicious drop.

Latitude: 70 degrees 0 minutes south.

Longitude: 11 degrees 50 minutes east.

Dawn.

Thrusting through the brash-ice that clogged the Princess Astrid Coast, Periscope Number One cast its eye on the frozen beach. The beholder of this panorama, Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre of the United States Navy, grinned expansively. The Astrid barrier was as deserted as he had guessed it would be. Not a single ice limbo rose from the sparkling silver cliffs. Home to the stations of Lazarev and Novolazarevskaya, Astrid had become like all other Soviet claims in Antarctica – an antimecca, unholy in the extreme, a land occasioning unspeakable profanities and pilgrimages of avoidance. A most reliable sanctuary, he decided.

He went to the galley, brewed a cup of coffee, sweetened it with gin. Walking down empty passageways and past abandoned quarters, he considered the facts of his triumph: a twelve-day run beneath five thousand miles of harsh, ill-charted ocean, from McMurdo Sound to the open Pacific, then out past the Circle, around the Palmer Peninsula, and on to the Astrid Coast, with not one man to assist him. He entered the periscope room, pushed his good eye against the viewfinder. Aiming toward the base of the Nimrod Glacier, a place called Shackleton Inlet on his chart, he adjusted the zoom control and twisted the focus knob.

A broad, flat hill of stone emerged from the blur. Clustered in the center of the nunatak were six trees – Lieutenant Grass’s hydroponic orchard, born and bred in the missile tubes, rocked in the cradles of death. Owing to rigorous applications of killerwhale dung and other indigenous fertilizers, the trees were healthy, oranges glowing beneath shawls of ice, branches bowing pliantly in the breeze, roots seizing stern nourishment from the bedrock.

From each tree dangled a noose of steel cable.

Several platoons from the Antarctic Corps of Guards stood between the orchard and the spectators. The infinite crowd spiraled outward from the nunatak to the glacial tongue, and from there to the plateau above and the Ross Ice Shelf below. Blazing torches grew from the pressure ridges, their jack-o’-lantern glow catching the branches and throwing serpentine shadows on the ground. GUILTY! Mount Christchurch shouted in letters ten feet high.

Walled off from the mob by a brigade of police, a score of dissidents waved banners: FREE PAXTON… NO SY MBOLIC EXECUTIONS… ANYONE WOULD HAVE SIGNED. Well, well, mused Sverre, Dr Valcourt’s lover has a following. A misty image formed in the captain’s mind. His bride-never-to-be, Kristin. Where was she now? Attending the executions? In an ice limbo? At what age had she gained the continent?

Under one of the nooses sat a Sno-Cat – a Death-Cat, Sverre decided – bristling with a fresh and lavish coat of black paint. Its windows were smeared with frost; dark flatus poured from its tailpipe. On the roof, a man in a black scopas suit paced anxiously. The eye holes of his black face-mask looked like terrible wounds. A rope ladder spilled from the Death-Cat to the ground.

Surrounded by guards, a second Cat, this one painted a morbid white, rumbled into view, stopping about ten yards from the orchard. Juan Ramos and Gila Guizot leaped from the cab and tromped around to the rear. Prodded by a gun muzzle, Randstable stumbled out, tripping over himself. Ramos guided him to the Death-Cat, ordered him to climb the ladder. As the condemned man reached the roof, the executioner set about his duties, lashing Randstable’s wrists together with a leather thong and securing his ankles with a scopas suit utility belt. He eased the metal noose around the ex-Wunderkind’s neck.

‘You have anything to say?’ shouted Ramos.

‘The megatonnage had dropped to twenty-five percent of our late fifties arsenal,’ Randstable stated evenly, each word unmistakable even to a novice lip reader like Sverre.

The executioner tightened the noose and pulled a black leather hood over the prisoner’s head. Turning to the driver of the Death-Cat, Ramos pantomimed a guillotine blade encountering a neck. The vehicle chugged away, taking the executioner with it.