James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

Randstable stayed behind.

Applause erupted from the mob. Some cried, ‘Bravo!’ Others, ‘Encore!’ and ‘Hooray!’ Sverre drank gin and cringed. He had expected better of his race. In the middle of Randstable’s second spasm, the front of his suit split and his little magnetic chess set burst out. The wind buckled the spectators’ signs: LET US IN… SLOW DEATHS FOR EXTINCTIONISTS… TARMAC, YOU SHOULD HAVE BASED THEM UP YOUR ASS… WHEN?

The Death-Cat stopped beneath the next tree.

Neck broken, consciousness gone, Randstable rotated in the frigid wind, his chess pieces scattered below his feet like fallen fruit. The physician of the court came forward with a stethoscope and listened to the hanged man’s heart. Shaking his head, the doctor stepped away. He shuffled, advanced, checked again, retreated. He checked a third time. A fourth. Finally, after twenty minutes in unquiet suspension, Randstable was pronounced dead.

Ramos went back to the white Cat, ordered Overwhite out. Within a minute the author of the STABLE treaties was on the gallows, bound, noosed, ready.

‘Have you anything to say?’ Ramos called.

‘In exchange for your compassionate understanding, I shall affirm that I see your viewpoint on this war and that I more or less comprehend why you are hanging me.’

His last negotiation.

The executioner lowered the leather hood, tightened the noose. Ramos signaled the Death-Cat. Overwhite’s boots bounced along the roof, and then they didn’t. Eleven minutes later, the physician declared him gone.

Gila Guizot dragged Reverend Sparrow into the gloomy air. Once atop the Death-Cat, he took out his little Bible, opened it, and recited with considerable majesty, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

There’s more truth in that than he realizes, thought Sverre, closing his good eye. When he looked again, the Bible lay in the snow and the evangelist was aloft.

Sverre focused on the white Cat. Had Wengernook, Tarmac, and Paxton seen the executions? What odd sensations were shooting through their red blood? Were they weeping? From the little he had experienced of the admitted mind, Sverre doubted that their thoughts were equal to the cosmic implications of the moment.

America’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs had become protoplasm. Four guards carried his limp and quivering body to the Death-Cat. They hauled him to the roof like a sack of rags, forced him into a standing position. Their muscled shoulders shored him up. Sverre recalled a videocassette that the tribunal had given him as he embarked on Operation Erebus. ‘This is the man we want,’ they had said, ‘You can watch it on the boat.’ It was a commercial for scopas suits starring a pious and nervous Robert Wengernook; the assistant defense secretary had explained that the suits were a deterrent, but failed to mention their uncanny powers against Antarctic weather. ‘Deterrence is only as good as the people it protects,’ he had said.

A guard stuck a cigarette in Wengernook’s mouth, where it bobbed around like a compass needle responding to a passing magnet, then fell out. Sverre grimaced. Operation Erebus was a mistake; there was no poetry in this.

‘Have you anything to say?’ Ramos called.

Wengernook began retching. Once airborne, it took him only two minutes to die.

The blizzard collected its forces. It rattled the trees and spun the four dead men. Branches flew away, crystalline oranges hit the ground. Through whirring snow Brat Tarmac walked to the scaffold – his pace was certain, measured, calm – and climbed.

Gazing through his rubber eye, Sverre directed his thoughts back to the days when he had believed in the tribunal, to the afternoon Tarmac had barged into his cabin demanding a retaliatory strike. He had disliked the general then, but today he noted a trait that he was inclined to call nobility. Admitteds took getting used to. He opened his good eye and saw Tarmac standing quietly on the dark roof, hands and feet bound, neck tethered to the tree. The MARCH Hare grinned at the crowd as the executioner placed the man-portable thermonuclear device in his holster.

‘Have you anything to say?’ Ramos called.

‘I say that I am inno—’

The executioner cinched the noose. It bit into the general’s throat, bringing blood. In a gesture at once dignified, insouciant, and vain, Brat refused the hood.

The Death-Cat lurched away, but the general had an iron neck, it would not snap. Briefly he danced amid the squalls of snow, grew tired, stopped. When the physician came forward, Brat planted a hard, icy boot in his face. Immediately Ramos took charge, ordering ten guards to line up. The MARCH Hare smiled crookedly as the rifles were raised. The order came. Bright red blood fountained forth, thick admitted juice rushing down the pristine front of Brat’s suit, speckling the ice, and then it was over, a soldier’s death after all.

Sverre drank gin, studied the white Cat. Under these circumstances, could Paxton possibly be thinking of sex? Had he and Dr Valcourt managed to make love before their separation? The captain pivoted the scope, fixed on where the future had taken its revenge, five trees fruited with convicted war criminals, the sixth tree empty, waiting.

George’s mind was slipping away from him.

Autistically he watched the progress of the ice clock, drops falling noisily to their destination, each as sad and final as a tear. Bang, bang went the drops, and barely an hour remained.

Then half an hour. Twenty minutes. Ten.

On the City of New York , Sverre entered the periscope room and scanned the continent in search of Lieutenant Grass’s orchard.

Bang, bang went the drops.

George looked up. A great red stain bloomed above his head. His ceiling was bleeding. The stain grew rapidly, extending its wet peninsulas.

He guessed that he was seeing the last unexpected effect of nuclear war.

A dark shape attacked the bloody ceiling from above. A fissure appeared, then a river system of cracks. Bits of ceiling fell inward, striking George’s shoulders and chest, panicking his spermatids.

The shape bartered relentlessly, until at last the ceiling split with a sound like a despairing frog. A million ice pellets burst into the cell; red droplets spattered downward, a bloodstorm. The wind entered in raw, razoring gusts, howling like an unadmitted child.

Why the Antarctic Corps of Guards did not simply come through the door was a puzzle George felt no inclination to solve. He picked up the family portrait, zipped it into the hip pocket of his scopas suit. Brat is planning to die with his manportable thermonuclear device at his side, he thought, and I shall die with my Leonardo.

A gigantic vulture of a type once thought extinct descended through the breach and landed on the floor.

So, thought George, they’ve changed the mode of my execution. I’m not to be hanged but devoured. Probably quicker, actually.

The teratorn screeched. Blood spilled from its beak like soup slopping out of a tureen. Its ratty feathers were inlaid with jewels of ice.

When George noticed a scopas-suited human astride the vulture’s neck, he realized that something other than an execution was in the making.

‘Climb aboard,’ called the rider, removing her helmet and releasing a burst of red hair. ‘I still believe you’re innocent,’ said Morning Valcourt. She tossed George a pair of goggles and a parka, its hood rimmed with wolverine fur.

‘You’ve tamed it?’ asked George. ‘God!’

‘Psychology 101 – Operant Conditioning. It’s usually done on pigeons, but it also works with teratorns.’

As Morning replaced her helmet, footfalls echoed through the tunnels outside the cell. George heard curses.