This Is the Way the World Ends

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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.

He looked beyond the sidewalks. For many darkbloods, time was too precious to spend on activism. In the side yard of Barrack F a mother and her daughter tossed a snow basketball back and forth. Next door an elderly man with rippling white sideburns stood on a hummock and pretended to conduct an orchestra, while behind Barrack W an adolescent boy attempted to make a Weddell seal jump through a hoop.

Eggs sailed out of the crowd, splattering the sides of the Cat. Thick wads of embryonic penguin seeped down George’s window. A rock flew from the scopas-gloved hand of an angry young Oriental woman, thunked into the windshield, and left a starburst.

‘That does it!’ shouted Dimitri Eliopoulos, a fat bespectacled man of volatile enthusiasms and potential Greek ancestry. He slapped the steering wheel with his palm. ‘From now on we stay clear of the population centers!’

The caravan got through Ice Limbo 414 without further incident.

‘We have ninety percent of the world’s ice here,’ said Dimitri later that afternoon, ‘See that glacier? Mulock. My place of birth.’

‘Birth?’ said George.

‘It was a birth to me, Paxton. Being dust and then suddenly getting a body and thoughts and cracking out of the ice, well, maybe it wasn’t snuggly blankets and my own private tit, but, by damn, it was something.’

On the outskirts of Ice Limbo 415 a scopas-suited Bulgarian ballerina danced. Despite her attire she was quite graceful, and her face displayed the sort of intellectual frown that George had so often seen and admired on Morning Valcourt. Morning is doing something at this very moment, he realized. Something ordinary? Sleeping? Eating? More likely – something profound. She is musing profoundly about Leonardo’s vulture fantasy…

Between Limbos 416 and 417 a Norwegian man with a fishing pole and a hacksaw tried to cut a hole in the ice. A flock of penguins ambled into view. Antarctica, Dimitri explained, held the planet’s one remaining ecosystem, a dystopia of birds and aquatic mammals awaiting the inevitable hour. George was endlessly saddened by the penguins’ trusting faces, their stuffedanimal cuteness, their utter obliviousness to the imminence of the bird who is like a writing desk.

‘Hey, Paxton, maybe you can settle an argument,’ said Dimitri. ‘I would have been Greek, okay? That means I would have hated all other Greeks, right?’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ laughed Gila Guizot. ‘That’s completely backwards. You would have hated non-Greeks.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Dimitri.

‘Take me, I would have been French,’ said Gila. ‘Also a Catholic.’

‘And proud of it,’ explained George.

‘Proud of French Catholics?’ asked Dimitri.

‘Proud to be a French Catholic,’ George answered patiently.

‘There, you see?’ said Gila. ‘I was right.’

‘What did she have to do to become a French Catholic?’ asked Dimitri.

‘Her parents would have been French Catholics,’ said George.

‘I seem to recall something about Protestants,’ said Dimitri. ‘She would have been proud of Protestants, too, right?’

‘She would have been proud to be a Protestant,’ said George. ‘If she had been one, that is.’

‘She would have been just a Catholic? Not a Protestant too?’

‘You were never both!’

‘Why not?’

‘You just weren’t,’ said George.

‘Too bad – she could have been even prouder,’ said Dimitri.

‘If she was both, I think she would have been less proud.’

‘Don’t mock me, Paxton.’

‘What are you?’ asked Gila.

‘A Unitarian,’ said George.

‘You were the ones who hated Jews – did I remember that right?’ asked Gila.

‘No,’ said George.

‘Muslims?’

‘No.’

‘Paxton is proud of everybody,’ said Dimitri knowingly.

Night came but not darkness, only the perpetual gloom of the late Antarctic summer. George dreamed of spermatids reaching epididymides and growing fine, strong tails.

At dawn the caravan began crossing the foot of the Nimrod Glacier, a river of ice gushing motionlessly from the interior plateau to the shelf. The warped and crevassed surface of the glacial tongue spread toward a promontory called Mount Christ-church, at the bottom of which sat a building made of the forever-frozen material known locally as Antarctic steel.

‘The Ice Palace of Justice,’ said Gila, pointing. It was a soaring, gaudy structure whose various intricacies – buttressed walls, bas-relief towers, decorous gates – seemed to disguise a sinister agenda, like the peppermint trim on a witch’s house. ‘Your new home.’

‘I’m hoping to see the South Pole,’ said George.

‘This place is much more interesting than the South Pole,’ said Dimitri.

‘I need to get there.’

‘The South Pole is over five hundred miles from here. Between the lack of public transportation and the fact that we intend to hang you soon, you’ll have to settle for the Ice Palace of Justice.’

The caravan slithered into the central courtyard. Dimitri twisted the ignition key; the Cat’s engine sputtered and died. As Gila dragged George into the frigid air, the wind tore nails of ice from the palace walls and flung them against his suit. The demonstrators waved their signs and brandished their frozen eggs. George and his co-defendants came together in a shivering, forlorn huddle. Wengernook glowered. Randstable hugged his magnetic chess set. Overwhite examined himself for neck tumors. Reverend Sparrow spoke with God. Even the bulk of his scopas suit could not keep Brat from looking pathologically underweight.

Police officers held back the demonstrators. The ground vibrated with angry shouts and the pounding of banner poles. NO MERCY FOR SPECIES KILLERS. George had never seen that one before. EXTINGUISH THE EXTINCTIONISTS. Nor that one. He longed for the witness stand – longed for it, feared it. Anybody would have signed that contract.

A rock-hard little man came forward brandishing a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement. The emblem on his scopas suit declared that he was a captain in the Antarctic Corps of Guards, and his nameplate said JUAN RAMOS. Silence settled, as if the lights were dimming in a crowded concert hall.

A conversation drifted into George’s ear.

‘…people who ended the world,’ a man was saying.

‘Bad people?’ a small boy asked.

‘Must be,’ said the man.

‘Father…?’

‘Yes, son?’

‘How soon before we die?’

‘Two months.’

‘Is that long?’

‘Oh, yes, son. Very long. Very, very long. Be quiet now.’

‘As Chief Jailor of the Antarctic National Dungeon,’ Juan Ramos began, ‘my first duty is to read you Article Sixteen of the Charter of the International Military and Civilian Tribunal.’

‘Dungeon? I don’t like the sound of that!’ bellowed Brat.

‘There are rules in this world for treating war prisoners!’

Someone hurled a scopas suit glove filled with seal dung. It struck Brat’s helmet and erupted.

‘“Article Sixteen – Procedures for Ensuring the Defendants a Fair Trial.”’ Juan Ramos’s mustache flared from each side of his upper lip like the hind legs of a tarantula. ‘“Section A – The indictment shall specify in detail the charges against the accused, and, furthermore, a copy of the indictment, translated into a language that he understands, shall be furnished to each defendant.”’ Gulls and skuas spiraled gracefully around the palace towers. ‘“Section B – Each defendant shall have the right, through himself or through counsel, to present evidence at the trial in support of his case.”’ Ramos climbed atop a five-foot pressure ridge. The wind wriggled his mustache; it seemed about to scurry away. ‘My second duty is to announce that your collective bail has been set in the amount of three hundred and sixty-two billion dollars, which, as it happens, is equal to last year’s United States Defense Department budget.’ He paused, grinned. ‘If by any chance you have this sum among you, I shall immediately contact your advocate on the matter of your release.’

A stairwell dropped from the courtyard into the white, cold interior of the glacier. Gila Guizot’s assault rifle steered George down the steps and then through several hundred feet of rising and falling, twisting and turning passageways. Seal-oil lamps sputtered along the dungeon walls. Guards streamed back and forth, their faces evincing anger, hatred, sadness, and badly developed consciences.

CELL 6 – PAXTON said the sign on the iron door. Stepping inside, George was shocked to see muted February sunlight spreading everywhere. He looked up. A transparent slab of ice roofed his cell. Gray, ugly clouds clogged the sky.

The place had been thoroughly suicide-proofed. The ice ceiling offered no purchase for a noose, and the edges of the furniture – bed, chairs, writing desk, commode – had been sanded into blunt little knolls. For some reason they let him keep his Leonardo, though he might easily have shattered it and then opened his wrist with a fragment. Why this privilege? One day a clue appeared, etched in the transparent ceiling. It was a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky: ‘The end of the world will be marked by acts of unfathomable compassion.’

And so George settled into prison life. He expected a repetition of his recent solitary confinement aboard the submarine, boredom without end. And for the first seventy-two hours, boredom is exactly what the dungeon delivered. Nothing happened there, not even the passage of the sun, the continent being in the twilight of its six-month day. George lay on his ice bed, sleeping, not sleeping, brooding, reading the indictment, visiting his psychic museum – Morning in her wedding dress, Morning suckling Aubrey.

Then the tortures began. Contrary to Brat’s fears, the genre of excruciation practiced at the Antarctic National Dungeon fell well within the definition of civilized behavior prescribed by the Geneva Protocols.

The prisoners’ torture was this: they were given whatever they wanted. They had only to name a pleasure, and it was theirs. Food? At six o’clock each evening Ramos’s underlings would serve a dinner that regarded every human taste bud as an erogenous zone; several bestselling cookbooks could have been derived from the secrets of preparing Adélie penguin en brochette and sea lion flambeé. Drink? The milk of the Weddell seal displayed extraordinarily un-milklike properties when fermented. Sex? What the local prostitutes lacked in experience they made up for in eagerness. Intellectual stimulation? Antarctica’s population included a large supply of hypothetical Pulitzer Prize recipients.

Above each cell, lively little mobs gathered, and as the prisoners indulged themselves, the darkbloods stared down through the transparent roof. Eyes filled the heavens like dying stars. The spectators clapped, whistled, stomped their feet, and chanted, ‘Let us in!’ It was a sport of ever-growing popularity. People brought lunch.

The first time George was offered a mug of coffee under these conditions, he swallowed it with equanimity. The second time, he took the mug to a corner and faced the walls, drinking in small, furtive sips. The third time, he let the coffee grow cold.

A prostitute named Trudy came calling. She had gained the continent in her physical prime. ‘Sorry it isn’t more private,’ she said, fiddling with George’s Velcro. ‘Just pretend they aren’t there.’

He glanced up. A young man with a Göttingen University patch on his scopas suit returned his gaze. ‘I would like you to go,’ said George.

‘Go?’ said Trudy.

‘You are very pretty,’ said George. ‘Please leave.’

‘Okay… but I want you to answer me a question.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll bet you can imagine what my question is.’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Imagine.’

‘I can’t.’

‘My question is, why the fuck did you end the world?’

Although the large central cell was intended for exercise, the defendants preferred using it for poker, which was permitted once an evening for ninety minutes. They bet food. Whenever a game ended, Juan Ramos appropriated most of the winnings and ate them on the spot. ‘We are not good,’ he explained. ‘Merely innocent.’

On the night before the trial was to begin, George returned from the poker game to find two lawyers in his cell. Gorgeous Dennie Howe he remembered from his inquisition at McMurdo Station. (Oh, the hearts she would have shattered… ) Her companion, who introduced himself as Parkman Cleave, looked even more callow than the rest of the defense team. George offered his visitors ice chairs. Children, he thought, always they send children. I’m being defended by a goddamn kindergarten.

‘We’ve just come from the Documents Division,’ said Dennie. ‘It’s like a monastery over there – papers culled from every corner of the United States and Western Europe, scribes copying page after page by candlelight.’

‘They arrived on a barge,’ said Parkman. His smile was as flashy as the clasps on his briefcase. ‘The Spirit of the Law.’

‘First, the good news,’ said Dennie. ‘Out of twenty tons of cargo, the entire case against you consists of one scopas suit sales contract.’

‘I know,’ said George.

‘Anything to drink around here?’ Parkman asked.

‘Cocoa. Coffee.’

The lawyers smiled in unison, ordered cocoa. George began heating water on a whale-oil stove.

‘Now, the bad news,’ said Dennie.

‘The chief prosecutor is Alexander Aquinas,’ said Parkman.

‘Never heard of him,’ said George.

‘Really? Oh – of course not,’ said Parkman. A smile pushed aside his cheeks, which were as smooth and pink as buffered Oklahoma granite. ‘If you’ve got Alexander Aquinas around, you can put away your steel traps.’

‘His books would have dealt mortal blows to plea bargaining and the insanity defense,’ Dennie explained with an admiration George thought might have been a touch more reluctant. ‘Alexander Aquinas would have gotten judges to hang their mothers.’

George spooned brown powder into two mugs, added hot water, served the sweet-smelling results.

‘You’re not having any?’ Parkman asked. Chocolate steam rolled through the cell.

‘No.’

‘We want to tell you how to plead,’ said Dennie.

‘Not guilty,’ said George.

‘That’s almost right,’ said Parkman.

‘You must say, “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment,”’ said Dennie.

‘Why?’ said George.

‘Because you’re not guilty,’ said Parkman.

‘In the sense of the indictment,’ said Dennie. ‘That’s how the Nazi war criminals pleaded,’ she added merrily.

‘We also want to teach you some tactics,’ said Parkman. ‘You must make a good impression on the judges.’

‘Keep your suit clean,’ said Dennie.

‘When the barber comes around, avail yourself of his services,’ said Parkman. ‘Let’s go for less hair, a neater beard, right?’

‘When you’re on the stand, it’s okay if you look nervous,’ said Dennie.

‘Try to look nervous, in fact,’ said Parkman. ‘We want to avoid that cold-blooded nuclear warrior image.’

‘Pretty child,’ said Dennie, lifting the Leonardo from the nightstand. ‘Your daughter?’

‘Bonenfant thinks he can get us off,’ said George, snatching away the priceless painting. ‘He said there’s a rabbit or two in his hat.’

‘It all depends on whether we find a vulture expert,’ said Parkman.

‘A what?’ said George.

‘Vulture expert,’ said Dennie.

‘Ever hear of the Teratornis?’ asked Parkman.

‘No,’ said George.

‘A species of vulture,’ said Dennie.

‘Obviously you’re not a vulture expert,’ said Parkman.

Vultures.

A shock of recognition surged through George. He had seen Parkman Cleave before… on the submarine… wearing a business suit… holding a bag of carrion. ‘I know you! You’re the one who takes care of my vulture!’

‘Your vulture?’ said Parkman.

‘Dr Valcourt calls it my vulture. It’s not really mine. I first ran into it at ground zero, then again on the boat, when you fed it.’ George returned his family to the nightstand. ‘Dr Valcourt told me that vultures can reproduce without males. They’re inseminated by the winds – that’s what people used to believe. Do you keep it as a charm? Perhaps it will bring your race good luck. It’s certainly big enough.’

‘Nothing can bring our race good luck,’ said Parkman.

‘No animals are inseminated by the winds,’ said Dennie.

‘Not even teratorns,’ said Parkman.

‘When you’re defending the men accused of ending the world,’ Dennie explained, ‘you try everything you can think of.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Across the interior plateau, down the great static swells of the Nimrod Glacier came the legions, shoulder to shoulder, bound for the trial of the millennium. The tromp of their boots sent fissures shooting across the continent’s ice fields and brought waves to its lakes and bays. Rushing from the Transantarctic Mountain Range, unadmitted tributaries flowed together in an endless torrent: male, female, young, old, Negro, Nordic, Alpine, Oriental, Pygmy, Eskimo. The pilgrims moved with exuberance and purpose, dodging nunataks, circumventing crevasses. Many of them whistled. A few skipped. Their signs and banners swayed in joyful arcs. Songs warmed the frigid air. For the first time since the darkbloods’ arrival, their future crackled with promise: at last they were to receive their due measure of cosmic knowledge, at last they would learn why it had been necessary to end the world.

The sight of the Ice Palace of Justice sent their buoyant spirits even higher. This was the final great construction project undertaken on earth, Antarctica’s omega to ancient Giza’s alpha, and its white towers, glittery parapets, frisky pennants, and Gothic windows made the pilgrims stop and gape. The drawbridge trembled under the first wave of darkbloods, the lucky ones who would get seats. The throngs left outside cast their eyes on the great ice tablets that formed the eastern face of Mount Christchurch. DEFENDANTS TO BE ARRAIGNED TODAY, the news sculptors had carved in the slopes in letters three feet high. TRIBUNAL WILL HEAR OPENING ARGUMENTS.

The courtroom was as solemn and self-important as the nave of a cathedral. End-of-summer sunlight streamed through the gutcovered windows, suffusing the air with ghostly cheer. Drooping from the balustrades and beams, a thousand melting icicles ticked away. The bulletproof glass booth in the center of the room had been intended to protect high-roller crap games aboard the City of New York; now it protected the Erebus Six. George sat between Brat and Wengernook, the latter sucking violently on an unlit cigarette and tying his fingers in knots. Reverend Sparrow pored over a small Bible. Overwhite napped after a sleepless night induced by darkblood tortures. Randstable worked on converting his suit’s primus stove into a device for keeping his cocoa at a constant temperature.

Peering through the frost, George scrutinized the mob in the gallery, face after face, hundreds of them. That woman could almost be Morning – a stronger chin was required. And that one had the red hair for it – if only her mouth were thinner. A pimply boy held up a sign that said, NUKE THEM IN THE EAR.

When the court usher, who bore a detailed resemblance to a rabbit, raised his halberd and rammed it against the floor, everyone rose. From a side door came four judges, dark robes trailing from their helmetless scopas suits. The president of the court, Shawna Queen Jefferson, was a spry little black woman who, as the Mount Christchurch news sculptors had recently revealed, would have become THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL SUPREME COURT JUSTICE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Kamo Yoshinobu’s locked-out intellect had been destined to transform the World Court from a joke into the most respected forum on the planet, an accomplishment that would have brought him the first Nobel Peace Prize ever given to a Japanese citizen. Jan Wojciechowski would have one day exploited the shadowed courtrooms of Cracow to expose the travesty that was Soviet justice. The extinction had robbed Theresa Gioberti of the international acclaim that would have accrued to her even-handed trial of a papal assassin.

‘The tribunal will hear the indictment,’ said Justice Jefferson upon assuming the bench. Hers was a musical sort of English, vibrant with theoretical experience.

At the translator’s table a small army of darkbloods leaned toward an array of battery-powered microphones appropriated from the submarine and rendered the judge’s decree into fifty languages.

George glanced at the prosecution table. Alexander Aquinas’s staff tormented the tomb inscriber with their manifest maturity. Like a hot air balloon cut free of its moorings, a rotund deputy prosecutor gradually left her chair, indictment at the ready. She attempted no theatrics, just smooth inflections, clean, clear, even a bit diffident.

‘None of that is true,’ George whispered toward his new spermatids. A vulture expert. Everything would be fine as long as the defense could locate a vulture expert.

‘The tribunal will arraign the defendants,’ said Justice Wojciechowski. ‘Robert Wengernook, will you please come before the bench?’

Locking his face in a sneer, the assistant defense secretary did as instructed.

‘How do you plead to the charges and specifications set forth in the indictment against you – guilty or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment,’ asserted Wengernook with a credibility George feared he would be unable to match.

So it went, down the line. Only Reverend Sparrow departed from the script, asserting that he was ‘a sinful man, guilty as Adam and Eve, but soon to be redeemed by the Son of Man.’

‘A plea of “not guilty” will be entered,’ said Justice Wojciechowski. ‘George Paxton, will you please come before the bench?’

Ten thousand unadmitted eyes drilled into George as he left the booth and walked across the courtroom.

‘How do you plead to the charges and specifications set forth in the indictment against you – guilty or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.’ The vaulted ceiling replayed his words, filling his ears with the oddly-timbred, public version of his voice.

There was a flurry of activity at the defense table. Martin Bonenfant, looking younger than ever, leaped up. ‘Your Honors, at this juncture we are compelled to challenge the competence of the tribunal.’ He waved a document in quick little spirals. ‘We request that you accept our petition to have this case immediately severed.’ Marching forward, he slapped the document on the frozen bench.

‘On what grounds?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘We submit that the deterrence measures specified in the McMurdo Sound Agreement were not recognized as crimes under any statutes, national or international, passed prior to the war. Hence, this tribunal violates the most fundamental principle of justice – nullum crimen sine lege previa, no crime without preexisting law. It is an ex post facto instrument, organized solely to convict. The six men in the dock are not defendants, they are scapegoats. We further submit that, because your Honors are yourselves unadmitted, you are not qualified to pass judgment on men for whom that race bears an instinctual hatred.’

The president of the court smiled, and the effect was of someone flipping back the dust cover on a piano. She removed her whalebone-framed glasses. ‘If you have truly forgotten the legal traditions underlying the trial, Mr Bonenfant, then I commend to your attention the document from which our indictment takes its wording – namely the 1945 London Agreement empowering an international court to prosecute Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany. As for your second argument, I concede that the loss of the human race stirs every judge on this bench, and that the evidence is likely to arouse our abhorrence. But our professional duty is to restrain such feelings, listening with an impartial ear, and this duty we shall honor.’ Justice Jefferson tapped her glasses against the icy bench. ‘Petition for severance denied,’ she announced in a tone suggesting that, in her canceled life, she had denied many a severance petition.

‘The same to your cat, Judge,’ muttered Brat.

‘All they want is an explanation,’ said Overwhite.

‘All they want is our ass,’ said Wengernook.

‘The prosecution will make its opening address,’ declared Justice Jefferson.

When Alexander Aquinas stood up, George saw that the forces arrayed against them were formidable indeed. The chief prosecutor was well over six feet tall. His head looked like a sculpture of itself – rough-hewn, bleak, larger than life. His shaggy gray hair and thick neck suggested that he owned lion genes. Slowly he walked to the bench, turned, and stared toward the gallery with the intensity of a man having a private audience with an angel. He smiled.

‘That this is the most important legal proceeding of all time cannot be doubted. The great precedents – Jerusalem and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Nuremberg and the trial of Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and others – will in the early days guide us like beacons set along a storm-lashed shore, but then we must head for open sea, with only our remembered humanity to guide us.’

‘He thinks like a girl,’ said Brat.

‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.

‘It is a strange proceeding,’ continued Aquinas. ‘It is both a war crimes trial and a peace crimes trial, with the peace crimes perhaps being more damnable – certainly more incomprehensible – than the war crimes.’ Spinning around, he fired a long, accusing finger toward the glass booth. His eyes trembled in his great skull like poached eggs. ‘For these men knew what the fusion bomb could do. They knew that deterrence through terror, which they misnamed “defense,” could not last forever. Indeed, they were often among the loudest, though rarely among the most eloquent, critics of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.’

George reminded his spermatids that he and his five friends were innocent.

‘And yet, in place of mutual assured destruction, they offered nothing. No – worse than nothing. They offered their infatuation with nuclear weapons – an infatuation they expressed in elaborate plans for winning nuclear wars… even if winning meant, and I quote from a speech by the defendant Wengernook, “that no enemy are left alive, but two Americans, male and female, have survived to start the race up again.”’

‘Can’t you use a goddamn metaphor any more without being dragged into court?’ asked Wengernook.

‘Do you really think one man and woman could start everything up again?’ asked George.

‘Of course,’ said Wengernook. ‘Assuming they got along.’

A calculated rage was building in Aquinas. ‘And the people said, “You must not do this!” And the defendants said, “You cannot stop us!”

‘And the people said, “We want to live!” And the defendants said, “The weapons are here to stay!”

‘And the people said, “We want grandchildren!” And the defendants said, “Don’t be so idealistic!”’

A gallows grew in George’s mind, the blood-sculpture that Sverre’s navy had fashioned at the celebration banquet. His dark, wet body dripped from the noose. He wondered what it was like to hang. He imagined himself at the moment of release, reaching up, grabbing the rope, hoisting himself back to life with a great muscled arm…

‘The fusion bomb was a costly mistress. Consider, your Honors. In 1979 this planet celebrated the International Year of the Child. Of the one hundred and twenty-two million children born that year, one of every ten was dead by 1982, and most died for lack of inexpensive food and vaccines. Yet in 1982 the world spent one trillion dollars on weapons. One trillion dollars!’

George’s arm slipped. The noose tightened.

‘Lays it on with a trowel,’ said Brat.

‘Two trowels,’ said Wengernook.

‘Let us jump ahead,’ said Aquinas. ‘In the year of the holocaust, the price of one new missile-carrying submarine equaled the combined education budgets of twenty-three developing countries…’

For the next half-hour the chief prosecutor reeled off similar statistics, most of them including the word ‘children.’

‘Nuclear weapons were the cheap defense,’ Wengernook explained to his co-defendants. ‘Can’t anybody get that straight?’

When Aquinas went back to his table, an associate prosecutor gave him hot cocoa while a deputy prosecutor delivered a computer printout.

‘At 7:34 on a Saturday morning,’ said Aquinas, ‘Eastern Standard Time, early warning systems detected the launch of ten Spitball cruise missiles from Soviet long-range manned bombers in a holding pattern near the Arctic Circle. NORAD computers inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, calculated the missiles’ trajectories, naming Washington, DC, as their target and giving 9:06 as the estimated time of detonation. A preemptive strike was evidently under way, with decapitation of the American command-and-control infrastructure as its primary objective.’

Aquinas presented the printout to Justice Jefferson, who put on her whalebone glasses and studied it with morbid curiosity.

‘At 7:40 all strategic forces were placed on full alert,’ the chief prosecutor continued. ‘At 7:52 satellite views confirmed that the detection was not due to an anomalous phenomenon. At 8:07 the NORAD computers and the SAC computers began debating their options. At 8:08 the debate ended when the computers voted to recommend anticipatory retaliation against Soviet ICBM fields as per the MARCH Plan. At 8:25 the President was taken from the White House by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, where he was subsequently spirited away by an airborne command post and never heard from again…

‘And so the world went to thermonuclear war. First strike, second strike, third, fourth. Keep it clean. Keep it surgical. Go for the other side’s war-waging capability, that’s all.’ Aquinas gave a small, quick smile. ‘Ah, but what if that war-waging capability embraces civilian population centers? There is a breezy little term for this particular brand of nuclear strategy. The term, learned judges, is city-busting.’ He hurled his mug across the courtroom, cocoa trailing behind like rocket exhaust. ‘But wait!’ he screamed as the mug shattered. ‘Could not the leaders of the superpowers see that they were dragging the human species into extinction? Of course they could. The leaders of the superpowers, however, were not beholden to the human species, but only to their respective sovereign states. How were they to explain the loss of so much for nothing? The destruction of a few cities was not a reason to quit, it was a reason to risk the rest.’

Returning to the prosecution table, Aquinas picked up a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement.

‘Thus were the Major Attack Options implemented,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Thus did the world follow the maps of hell so diligently drawn by Robert Wengernook, Brian Overwhite, Major General Roger Tarmac, Dr William Randstable, Reverend Peter Sparrow, and George Paxton.’

The prosecutor caressed the barbed-wire binding of the agreement. A pearl of black blood appeared on his index finger. He moved the finger across the cover, drawing an X in blood.

‘If faced with the unenviable task of defending these six men, I would perhaps argue that they had no choice. Their adversary was piling weapon upon weapon, and their only option was to do likewise. But that is a false argument. It was possible to rid the planet of the nuclear threat. Not by organizing a world government or bringing heaven to earth, but by diplomatic measures fully within the defendants’ knowledge and capabilities. As the case for the prosecution unfolds, you judges will learn exactly what this solution was. The gravamen of the charges against these men lies in their deliberate refusal to consider it. In short, the prosecution is prepared to prove criminal negligence on a scale the world has never seen before – and will never see again!’

Aquinas sat down and accepted handshakes from his assistants.

Although George’s worst fear – that the courtroom would erupt in thunderous applause – was not realized, he did see smiles lighting the faces of almost everyone in the gallery. Many spectators, including several of the Mount Christchurch reporters, pantomimed the act of clapping. A young woman, manifestly gripped by a variety of romantic fantasies involving Aquinas, trembled and wept.

‘This guy’s full of yams,’ said Brat.

‘Diplomatic measures – hah,’ said Overwhite.

‘No doubt he leaves a note to the tooth fairy whenever his dentures fall apart,’ said Wengernook.

‘I never drew a map of hell,’ said George.

‘The tribunal will recess for lunch,’ said Justice Jefferson.

SEVERANCE PETITION DENIED, proclaimed the slopes of Mount Christchurch. AQUINAS MAKES MAGNIFICENT OPENING ADDRESS.

Slowly, Martin Bonenfant approached the bench. His stride was a kind of ambulatory Rorschach test. One could project anything one fancied into it anxiety hiding behind a facade of confidence, confidence hiding behind a facade of anxiety, anxiety and confidence in dynamic equilibrium.

‘Learned judges, citizens of Antarctica, friends.’ Bonenfant’s words rolled hesitantly from between lips set in the slightest of smiles. ‘This morning the prosecution addressed us in the language of passion. I cannot condemn his ploy, for atomic weaponry is an invention worthy of no other emotion save horror. Your verdict, however, will be a judgment not on nuclear war but on policies designed to avert, control, and mitigate nuclear war. This case must be decided on the basis of facts, not feelings.

‘The first fact, one you will repeatedly be asked to appreciate in the coming weeks, is the extreme improbability of the recent extinction.’ His voice was stronger now, his inflections lilting and smooth. ‘If I may use a crude analogy, for I lack Mr Aquinas’s way with words, it would be this – the chances of the war unfolding as it did, with such a regrettable outcome, were about the same as those of a woman who takes contraceptive pills getting pregnant by her infertile lover.’

Of the four judges, only Theresa Gioberti seemed offended. The others beat down smiles.

An unlikely extinction, thought George. That’s an excellent point, he decided.

‘The second fact is that my clients, far from wishing to fight World War Three, devoted their professional lives to its prevention. Look toward the dock. You will see not war planners but patriots. If these men are guilty, your Honors, then their crime is limited to a count not listed in the McMurdo Sound Agreement, a count called “Love of Peace.”’

‘He’s good,’ said Wengernook.

‘He’s very good,’ said Brat.

‘The only game in town is not necessarily crooked,’ said Randstable.

‘Which brings us to the third fact,’ said Bonenfant. ‘The threat to peace. Right before Mr Aquinas gave his address, I bet my two assistants that he would get through it without once mentioning the Russian Communist Empire by name. He never did. Twice he used the word “Soviet,” once the word “adversary.”

‘Your Honors, do you know what nation, prior to the war, was engaged in the largest military buildup of all time?’ The advocate’s glossy black hair had taken on a life of its own, slapping his forehead, flying skyward. ‘Do you know what nation violated virtually every arms control agreement it ever signed? Slaughtered millions of its own citizens in the name of collectivizing agriculture? Employed illegal chemical and biological weapons in Southeast Asia? Persecuted more Jews than anyone since Adolf Hitler? Routinely imprisoned its pacifists and dissidents in psychiatric hospitals?’

In George’s mind the blood-gallows had melted completely away. By God, he thought, we do have a case. We’re innocent after all.

‘Spreading outward since the October revolution, the cancer of Russian Communism engulfed country after country. Azerbaijan. Armenia. The Ukraine. Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Poland. Rumania. East Germany. Hungary. Czechoslovakia. Item – in 1983, a Prague grocery clerk was sentenced to five years at hard labor for possessing an unregistered mimeograph machine. Item – reliable observers report that, as part of its campaign of terror in Afghanistan, the Soviet army air-dropped toys into the villages for the little boys and girls of the tribes. Each toy was equipped with explosives that detonated when picked up, commonly blowing off a child’s arm…’

Bonenfant had a hundred more items ready. The frigid afternoon disappeared, replaced by a bottomless pit of betrayal and atrocity. Whenever George blinked he saw a little Afghan girl picking up a doll. He could not bring himself to visualize the explosion.

‘Why are there no Soviet defendants in this courtroom? Where is the Secretary General of the Communist Party? The Commander in Chief of the Warsaw Pact? The Minister of Defense? Their absence speaks volumes. The framers of the McMurdo Sound Agreement knew there was no point in putting Soviets on trial, so manifestly guilty was Moscow of turning the world into an armory and ruining the peace that was my clients’ daily dream.’

We’re going to win, George told his spermatids.

‘Following a mandate from the electorate, acting with the consent of the governed, the men in the dock sought to check the expanding Soviet tumor using whatever technologies were available. Mr Aquinas has questioned the wisdom of defending freedom with thermonuclear weapons. Permit me to enumerate the successes of this doctrine.

‘The Berlin airlift. The end of the Korean War. The honorable resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. Analysts have linked all of these triumphs – and more – to US nuclear capabilities. If history teaches us anything, it’s that tyrants are tempted by weakness and tempered by displays of strength. Does anyone here seriously doubt that, above all else, the Soviet Union respected military might?’

I certainly don’t doubt it, George thought.

‘For nearly half a century, peace reigned in Western Europe. Why? NATO’s theater nuclear forces. During those same decades, the planet suffered no global-scale wars. Why? America’s strategic nuclear forces. This is an astonishing record. Indeed, it is fair to say that, between the Second and Third World Wars, these weapons saved more human lives than penicillin.’

Before hurling out his final sentences, Bonenfant rose to full height. To George, the advocate had never looked more mature.

‘And so I ask – who among your Honors, who among the prosecutors, who among the spectators in this courtroom would have dared renounce such a sturdy doctrine, leaping into the awesome uncertainties of a non-nuclear world? Who here would have dared do that? Who?’

As Bonenfant settled behind the defense table, Parkman gave him cocoa capped by two marshmallows. He took a long, leisurely swallow.

Delighted chatter floated through the glass booth. Overwhite remarked that Bonenfant knew his stuff. Wengernook noted that the cancer metaphor was ‘unexpectedly rich.’ Sparrow complained that the advocate had ‘said nothing about their atheism.’ Brat asserted that they had ‘won the opening round, hands down.’ His friends’ happiness gave George a satisfaction he had not known since Mrs Covington had unveiled his forthcoming family.

He studied the bench. The faces of Justices Yoshinobu and Gioberti had lost the dark flush of unadmitted blood. Eyes shut, mouth drooping, Justice Wojciechowski looked like a man praying to a god in whom he did not believe.

‘The tribunal will recess until nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ said Shawna Queen Jefferson in a hoarse and troubled voice.

‘Fellas,’ said Randstable, ‘I think we’ve got ourselves a game.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Like white paper stalagmites, stacks of documents grew from every flat surface in the courtroom. The documents flowed down the aisles and splashed across the judge’s bench. Day after day, each passing with the speed of a snail navigating glue, Aquinas’s staff read aloud articles from Strategic Doctrine Quarterly by Brat Tarmac. Grim-lipped stenographers scribbled down arms control agreements negotiated by Brian Overwhite. Weary translators repeated descriptions of blueprints bearing William Randstable’s name. The tribunal heard speeches by Robert Wengernook, entire bestselling books by Reverend Sparrow, and a scopas suit sales contract signed by George Paxton. Memoranda, monographs, reports, resolutions, directives, letters, field manuals, and Republican Party platforms gradually entered the record.

‘The judges are growing restive,’ observed Randstable.

‘Bored out of their trees,’ said Brat.

‘Mr Aquinas,’ said Justice Jefferson, pushing documents aside with a windshield-wiper sweep of her arm, ‘the court believes it is time you examined your first witness.’

Aquinas pulled a deposition from his scopas suit and smoothed it out on the prosecution table.

‘In the McMurdo Sound Agreement,’ he said, rising, ‘a date is written, a date so notorious that few of us are willing to speak its name. On this date the Third World War began. According to another calendar, however – the calendar by which we would all have been admitted – something else happened, would have happened, on this date. On this date certain American citizens would have begun to see a way out of the nuclear miasma. Subsequent days would have found them talking among themselves, and then to their children. The children would have grown up… The prosecution calls Brigadier General Quentin Flood, United States Army.’

The witness entered the courtroom at the head of an invisible parade. Assuming the stand, he exuded an aura that George was inclined to call gallantry. He seemed chipped from the Tarmac stone – sturdy, handsome, flamboyant. His scopas suit displayed a mass of ribbons and medals.

‘Who could this jerk be?’ said Wengernook.

‘Leave it to the Army to give the world another asshole,’ said Brat.

The rabbity little court usher scurried over, pulled a Bible from his unzipped suit, and asked the witness whether he intended to speak the pure truth. ‘I do,’ said Flood.

‘At what age did you gain the continent?’ asked Aquinas.

‘Forty-two.’

‘According to your memories, would you have founded an organization called Generals Against Nuclear Arms?’

‘Correct.’

‘Forty-two. That’s young for a brigadier general.’

‘Mine was a new breed.’ Flood had a melodious southern drawl. ‘Spoilers, they called us.’

‘What did you spoil?’

‘Nuclear strategy.’

‘As defined by Secretary Wengernook and General Tarmac?’

Bats leave hell more slowly than Bonenfant got up. ‘Objection!’

‘Try another question, Mr Aquinas,’ said Justice Jefferson.

The chief prosecutor grimaced and asked, ‘Where did you first encounter traditional nuclear strategy?’

‘In articles from Strategic Doctrine Quarterly,’ answered Flood. ‘One was “After Deterrence: Options for the Infra-War Period” by Secretary Wengernook over there. Another was “Our Achilles Leg: Triad Theory and Land-Based Defenses” by Major General Roger Tarmac.’

‘What was the philosophy of Generals Against Nuclear Arms?’

‘That weapons having absolutely no military utility are unfit to be the centerpiece of a great democracy’s defensive posture.’

‘It must have been hard converting your elders in the Pentagon to this view.’

‘Ever try stuffing a melted marshmallow up a wildcat’s ass? It can be done, but you have to like your job.’

Strolling over to the prosecution table, Aquinas snatched up the witness’s deposition. ‘A famous and influential book you would have written – Weapons for What? – would have ended with the statement, quote, “Thus do our nuclear forces corrupt us. They debase and dispirit the ancient and honorable profession of soldiering. They are unpatriotic. We must try to—”’

‘Objection!’ Bonenfant rose fumingly. ‘Your Honors, the defense does not find these glib opinions and unsubstantiated assertions very instructive.’

‘Yes – might we hear more of the witness’s actual experiences?’ Justice Jefferson asked of Aquinas.

‘He has no actual experiences.’ The chief prosecutor turned toward the bench. ‘He’s one of—’

‘You know what I mean,’ admonished Justice Jefferson.

Aquinas made an awkward about-face, grabbing the stand for support. ‘I see from your deposition that your group endorsed the Einstein VI Treaty. Generals do not normally sponsor arms control agreements.’

Flood said, ‘We had concluded that strategic nuclear weapons, particularly the first-strike arsenals favored by Wengernook and Tarmac, make a nation weaker, not stronger.’

‘Because they continually pressure the other side to preempt?’

‘Right. The guy who goes first goes best – you can’t escape that terrible truth.’

‘The guy who goes first goes best,’ Aquinas repeated slowly. ‘Thank you, General. The witness is yours, Mr Bonenfant.’

As Aquinas returned to his team, the chief counsel ambled forward and offered Flood a good-natured grin.

‘Let’s get a little blood on the floor, Bonenfant,’ said Wengernook.

‘You can’t play nice with the Army,’ said Brat.

‘Yeah,’ said George.

Bonenfant pointed to the witness’s chest. ‘Handsome medals you’ve got there.’

‘Thank you,’ said Flood.

‘I imagine they tell of your meteoric rise to the rank of brigadier general.’

‘Some of them would have come after that.’

‘Oh? Might any of these medals testify to your talents as a commander in the field?’

Flood tapped a metal sunburst. ‘I was awarded this one after Skovorodino.’

‘Some of us may not be up on our unadmitted history.’

‘Skovorodino would have been a major battle of the Greco-Russian War.’

‘Which occurred after the Einstein VI arms control agreement went into effect?’

‘Yes.’

‘Evidently this treaty you’re so fond of permitted further Soviet expansionism.’

‘Bull’s eye, Bonenfant,’ said Wengernook.

‘Kid does his homework,’ said Brat.

Flood’s mouth was as straight and rigid as a chisel mark in a granite tombstone. ‘That’s hard to say.’

‘Would many Americans have died in the Greco-Russian War?’ asked Bonenfant.

‘Almost two hundred thousand,’ said Flood.

‘Almost two hundred thousand,’ Bonenfant echoed. ‘You have much on your conscience, General… Now, a little while ago I heard you claim that nuclear weapons have no military utility. Suppose that, as a field commander, you had been charged with repelling an attack on West Germany by the Eighth Soviet Shock Army. Wouldn’t a few enhanced-radiation charges be pretty useful to you?’

‘West Germany doesn’t exist.’

‘Just answer the question.’

The general’s mouth melted into a frown. ‘Battlefield nuclear weapons might have been useful in the immediate crisis. But after that—’

‘Useful, did you say?’

‘Useful in the—’

‘One final question. Exactly how many Soviet officers belonged to this organization of yours?’

‘There were no Soviet military officers in Generals Against Nuclear Arms. However, we did—’

‘How many Soviet officers?’

‘None,’ grunted the witness.

‘Thank you, General Flood.’ Bonenfant strutted away from the stand, a smile strung between his bulging cheeks like a hammock.

‘We blew him out of the water, don’t you think?’ said Brat.

‘Definitely our inning,’ said Wengernook.

‘Definitely,’ said George.

After lunch Aquinas called to the stand a rosy, elfin woman dressed in a black scopas suit with an inverted collar. She was rolypoly and roly again.

‘A lady?’ said Brat. ‘They’re using a lady against us?’

‘They’re getting desperate,’ noted Wengernook.

The witness was sworn in on a Douay Bible, giving her name as Mother Mary Catherine.

‘If admitted, would you have been a Catholic priest?’ asked Aquinas.

‘Yes.’

‘Female Catholic priests used to be a rare commodity.’

‘Times change.’

‘Were you also a Vice President of the United States?’

‘I would have been, yes.’

‘And did you leave office before serving out your term?’

‘When I accepted the second spot on the ticket, I had a secret in my heart.’ Mother Mary Catherine’s high, scratchy voice suggested an early Hollywood sound film. ‘I knew that, shortly after being elected, I would resign over my President’s defense policies.’

‘And who would that President have been?’

‘He’s over there in the dock – Reverend Peter Sparrow.’

George glanced at the defendant in question. Flabbergasted by the news of his would-be election, Sparrow alternately smiled and grimaced.

Mother Mary Catherine turned to the bench, winked impishly, and said, ‘Be sure to convict that chucklehead. He thinks a country’s Christianity is measured by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal.’

Sparrow now wore the look of a boy engaged in wetting his pants.

‘Objection!’ shouted Bonenfant, rising. ‘The witness is giving slander, not testimony!’

As Justice Jefferson instructed the stenographers to delete Mary Catherine’s last remark, a glimmer of chagrin crossed the prosecutor’s face. He denied his distress with a smile and said, ‘Before resigning, you would have used your office in an unorthodox manner.’

‘Let’s face it, Mr Aquinas, I was a cut-up.’

‘Some of your activities—’

‘Stunts. They were stunts.’

‘Didn’t you propose a rather strange arms control agreement?’

‘I tried to start something called SWAP – the Strategic Weapons Adjustment Plan.’ Mary Catherine folded her hands and placed them on her lap in a neat little bundle. ‘The idea was to let the superpowers build any sort of crazy arsenals they wanted, but with the stipulation that they would trade once finished. No quicker way to get the warheads defused, I figured.’

‘You also wanted to set up Genocide Prevention Centers.’

‘Telephone hotlines staffed twenty-four hours a day. Whenever a missile engineer got the urge to design some fiendish new weapon system, he would call his nearest Genocide Prevention Center and somebody would try talking him out of it.’

‘Tell us about the Preschooler Empowerment Act.’

‘If adopted, it would have prevented the Pentagon from contracting for a new type of bomber or missile until its pros and cons had been explained to a four-year-old chosen at random from any nursery school in Washington, DC. Whatever the four-year-old decided, that was the weapon’s fate.’

A dozen spectators held up a huge banner. WE LOVE YOU, MOTHER MARY CATHERINE, it said.

‘I would like the tribunal to know about your National Day of Shame,’ said Aquinas.

‘My husband’s idea, really. We called for everyone involved with thermonuclear weapons – technicians, politicians, professors – to stay out of work for a day. We said that the next morning they should bring in notes from their mothers.’

‘Notes saying…’

‘“My child was absent yesterday because he was sick of being up to his neck in excrement.”’

‘Nuclear weapons make you mad, don’t they, Mother Mary?’

‘Mad as a hornet.’

‘No further questions.’

In the gallery a second banner was unfurled: MOTHER MARY CATHERINE FOR SAINTHOOD.

‘Well, men, what do you think?’ said Brat.

‘She said nothing we haven’t all heard before,’ Sparrow replied.

‘Except the stuff about your being elected President,’ said Wengernook.

‘There’s no telling what a Christian will be called upon to do,’ said Sparrow.

‘Congratulations,’ said George.

‘You would have gotten my vote,’ said Brat.

Eyes flashing, mouth set in a formidable smile, Bonenfant charged up to the stand.

‘He’d better go easy,’ said Wengernook. ‘Everybody likes a nun.’

‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

‘She’s heading for hell,’ said Sparrow.

‘She’s unadmitted,’ said Overwhite. ‘She’s in hell.’

The chief counsel began, ‘Miss Catherine – these various antics of yours, how do you suppose they went over in Moscow?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘The old men in the Kremlin must have been delighted knowing that an American Vice President was calling for SWAP talks and so on.’

‘I’ve never visited the Kremlin.’

‘Evidently not. Now, when you first proposed the Soviet Day of Shame, was the plan to hold it simultaneously with the American one? Or did you perhaps neglect to call for a Soviet Day of Shame?’

‘My goal was to educate the American public concerning the absurdities of—’

‘Just answer the question, please. Did you or did you not call for a Soviet Day of Shame?’

‘I did not.’

‘He’s got her on the run,’ said Brat cheerfully.

‘Nuns don’t hold up over the long haul,’ said Wengernook.

‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

‘You realize, I am sure,’ said Bonenfant, ‘that these pacifist ideas of yours go against the Catholic Church’s doctrine of just war.’ He illustrated the word pacifist with a smirk. ‘Don’t you think perhaps you should have been born a Quaker?’

‘I think perhaps I should have been born.’

‘Did you really resign your office, Miss Catherine, or did President Sparrow ask you to step down?’

‘I resigned. I announced that I could no longer be part of an administration that slept with genocidal weapons.’

George was impressed by the way Reverend Sparrow managed to confine his fury within a broad, loving smile.

‘I imagine the Soviets were sorry to see you out of power,’ said Bonenfant. ‘No further questions.’

‘We used to run into her type around Washington,’ said Wengernook. ‘Always yelling for peace, as if we were at war. You can’t be logical with nuns.’

‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

‘Jefferson’s becoming fed up, don’t you think?’ said Wengernook.

‘The whole damn bench is becoming fed up,’ said Brat.

George breathed an elaborate sigh of relief. As a Unitarian, he had always found Catholics frightening and vaguely extraterrestrial, all that blood squirting from Jesus’ palms. It could have been much worse.

The following morning a deputy prosecutor told the tribunal that his team would now be introducing a ‘new category of evidence.’ They wanted the judges to see ‘models of the very instruments through which the defendants had committed the extinction.’

‘The court cautions you to keep things moving,’ said Justice Gioberti. ‘We haven’t the luxury of a flexible calendar.’

‘Nothing to worry about, your Honors,’ replied the deputy prosecutor, a tubby man whose stomach kept billowing out of splits in his scopas suit. ‘We have taken steps to guarantee that the presentation will be swift, lucid, and even, if I may be so bold’ – he blew on a tin whistle – ‘entertaining.’

A quick drum roll drew George’s attention to the press box, where the reporters had been evicted in favor of a dance band. The cymbal sounded, the trumpets answered with a salacious fanfare, and then all the musicians launched into an uptempo rendition of ‘Swanee River.’ A line of attractive female associate prosecutors wearing top hats and spangled scopas suits began parading through the courtroom, each carrying an item from America’s pre-war deterrent. Rapidly an ice arsenal accumulated before the bench, dozens of intricately carved replicas. Little frozen missiles piled up, labeled with cardboard tags. Short-range, medium-range, intercontinental. Air-launched, ground-launched, sea-launched. ‘Such as Gloria’s security, Exhibit G here, a solid propellant, mediumrange missile intended for the European theater,’ said the deputy prosecutor. ‘Exhibit H, currently defending our friend Kimberly, represents America’s force of Tomahawk sea-to-surface cruise missiles armed with two-hundred-and-fifty-kiloton…’

Warheads appeared. Low-yield, high-yield, enhanced-radiation. ‘Exhibit M being an MK-12 reentry vehicle from the Guardian Angel II ICBM. And now the court will please observe Dolores and her Exhibit N, one of the Navy’s twenty-kiloton nuclear…’

Sea mines were paraded through the courtroom. Nuclear land mines, nuclear torpedos, nuclear free-fall bombs.

After lunch the prosecution unveiled a new branch of the ice arsenal, nuclear-capable and nuclear-armed aircraft. ‘Including Shirley’s deterrent, Exhibit T, a Macho Mike helicopter equipped with two nuclear depth charges. We now present the category of nuclear-capable and…’

Nuclear-armed ships arrived. Carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines. ‘Such as SSBN 688 Lyndon Johnson, a high-speed attack submarine armed with Harpoon missiles. Our final weapon, your Honors, Exhibit W, is being fielded by young Wendy. You will observe that it is not made of ice.’

As the band played ‘Camptown Races,’ Wendy carried Brat’s man-portable thermonuclear device to the bench and set it before Justice Yoshinobu.

‘This isn’t likely to explode or anything, is it?’ asked the judge, hefting the weapon.

‘Oh, no,’ said the deputy prosecutor. ‘The firing procedure involves a twelve-digit code and a little brass key. As we all know from personal experience, your Honors, nuclear weapons are one of the safest technologies ever invented.’

‘Place looks like a goddamn toy store,’ said Wengernook.

‘They’re pissed by all this clutter, you can tell,’ said Brat.

‘Really pissed,’ said George. ‘Toy store,’ he added, fighting tears.

At the end of the second week the prosecution called a silver-haired and aristocratic gentleman named Victor Seabird. He was handsome in the way that only advancing age can be, the hand-someness of a deep-rooted tree or an antique clock.

‘Mr Seabird, according to your recollections would you have been the principal American negotiator of the so-called Einstein Treaties?’ Aquinas asked.

‘That is correct,’ said the witness.

Waves of well-being surged through George, as if he were in the presence of Nadine Covington.

‘At the time of the holocaust,’ said Aquinas, ‘nuclear weapons control was the exclusive province of STABLE, the Strategic, Tactical, and Anti-Ballistic Limitation and Equalization talks engineered by the defendant Overwhite. Would the Einstein process have continued his initiatives?’

‘We broke completely with the STABLE approach,’ answered Seabird. ‘It was for shit,’ he added brightly.

‘That’s his opinion,’ muttered Overwhite.

‘Einstein I outlawed anti-satellite technologies,’ said Seabird. ‘Einstein II was a comprehensive test ban. Einstein III extended the 1968 nonproliferation treaty. Einstein IV was a moratorium on warhead assembly and land-based missile deployment. Einstein V halted production of weapons-grade material. Einstein VI mandated the destruction of all nuclear stockpiles. Our basic goal, you see, was to—’

‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Justice Gioberti. ‘Are you saying you would have abolished nuclear weapons?’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Seabird.

The four judges leaned forward in spontaneous but perfect synchronization.

‘That must have been a hard treaty to negotiate,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘A bear,’ said Seabird.

‘Did it help when you got that funding increase?’ asked Aquinas.

‘The budget of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has traditionally been one ten-thousandth the size of the Defense Department’s,’ said Seabird. ‘When we went into Einstein VI, however, we were nearly as big as the Post Office.’

‘Some of us on the bench are surprised that the Soviets signed Einstein VI,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘Their motives, I believe, were economic. Totalitarian socialism is a foolish enough way to run a country without throwing in an arms race.’

For the next four hours Seabird outlined the details of the abolition regime. Nations included… technologies banned… timetables… verification…

‘Verification,’ said Aquinas. ‘I imagine that took several barrels of midnight oil to work out.’

‘God, yes. Don’t remind me.’ When Seabird smiled, another well-being wave hit George. ‘Of course, with an abolition regime, verification is easier than with a more limited agreement, in that a single sighting of a banned weapon is sufficient to prove a violation.’

‘Still, no verification system is perfect,’ said Justice Gioberti.

‘That’s where the space forts came in,’ said Seabird. ‘Orbiting platforms armed with charged-particle beams that could kill enemy missiles during the boost phase. Einstein VI encouraged the nuclear powers to pursue this technology, along with unarmed interceptor-rockets and ground-based laser defenses.’

‘America would have taken the lead here, as I recall,’ said Aquinas.

‘When the Soviet space forts proved unreliable, we saw no alternative but to ship them a few of our prototypes.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Justice Gioberti. ‘You gave this technology to the Soviets?’

‘As you might imagine, your Honors, it’s frightfully de-stabilizing for only one nuclear power to be building effective ballistic missile defenses.’

‘Do space forts render civilian populations invulnerable?’ Aquinas asked.

‘In an all-out attack, many cities would still have been lost. The forts were essentially a hedge against cheating.’

‘So space-based defenses make little sense in the absence of disarmament?’

‘Without Einstein VI, it’s a fair guess – I’m certain of it really, when I look at history – a fair guess that the space forts would have carried the traditional arms race into whole new realms of psychosis.’ Seabird indicated the frozen missiles piled up before the bench. ‘The nuclear powers would have sought to overwhelm each other’s forts with huge offensive deployments.’

‘Were there any other hedges against cheating?’

‘The treaty allowed its signers to build fallout shelters to a fare-thee-well, and even to adopt those weird crisis relocation schemes – you know, where they take everybody out into the country? It also permitted extensive modernization of conventional forces in Europe. After all, this was the real world we were talking about.’

George wondered exactly how Bonenfant was going to rip apart Einstein VI. Why would Bonenfant want to rip apart Einstein VI? asked his spermatids. To help our case, he replied.

‘It must have been a great day when this agreement went into effect,’ said Aquinas.

‘Two intermediate-range missiles kicked off the regime,’ said Seabird. ‘The UN brought them here to Antarctica. I watched the whole thing on television. My family and me, my grandchildren. I’ll never forget. Who could forget? High noon, Greenwich Mean Time. Ross Island, Antarctica. The ceremony began with a team of scientists removing the fissionable material from the warheads and turning it over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which later diluted it with uranium-238 and burned it up in a Brazilian nuclear power plant.’

‘So the missiles were now disarmed…’

‘An American MacArthur III and a Soviet SS-90. The Army Corps of Engineers carried them to the top of the Mount Erebus volcano and suspended them on chains. And then all these teenagers, about a dozen high-school students from different countries, they started cranking the windlass and lowering the missiles into the crater. First the one with the American flag on its side – the kids melted it. Then the one with the hammer and sickle—’

As when a shower rushes on an unsuspecting picnic, Victor Seabird began suddenly to cry. His sobs echoed off the slick white walls of the Ice Palace. Aquinas comforted the negotiator with an unembarrassed hand on his shoulder.

‘These are painful memories,’ said the prosecutor.

‘A few minutes later the celebrations started.’ Seabird removed tears from his cheeks with little flicks of his index finger. ‘It was like… I don’t know. Like when your team wins the World Series on a ninth-inning homer or something.’ The witness’s voice became a rasp as he described how people celebrated Einstein VI – how they honked their car horns, blew factory whistles, drank toasts, closed schools, took the afternoon off, observed moments of silence, threw parties, went to church, smiled at strangers… ‘Stevie went marching around the house. He was three. He had this little American flag. “Granddaddy got rid of the bombs!” he kept shouting. “Granddaddy got—”’ Despair jammed the negotiator’s throat.

The silence was long and thick. George’s bullet wound throbbed. All he could imagine was Holly marching through Victor Seabird’s house, waving the Stars and Stripes. He saw her doing a silly dance with Stevie.

We’re sunk, aren’t we? his spermatids asked. Not if a vulture expert shows up, he replied.

Slowly, grandly, Aquinas said, ‘No further questions.’

And then it came. The applause. It shook the gallery and laid siege to the glass booth. Overwhite pushed his gloved hands against his ears. When the tumult finally subsided, Justice Jefferson invited Bonenfant to cross-examine.

‘There are all kinds of problems with that abolition proposal,’ said Overwhite, lowering his hands.

‘If Bonenfant is any good, he’ll eat it for breakfast,’ said Wengernook.

‘Remember when they tried to get rid of booze in the twenties?’ said Brat. ‘A disaster.’

George admitted to his spermatids that he was very confused.

‘Mr Seabird,’ said Bonenfant, closing for combat, ‘I fail to see any ultimate merit in your Einstein VI treaty. Like all such utopian schemes, it depended on trusting a country that had lied about its missile installations in Cuba, had shot down a defenseless Korean airliner… the list is endless.’

‘Well, the pre-abolition world entailed quite a bit of trust, too, don’t you think?’ said Seabird. ‘Every day, those defendants over there trusted the Soviets not to try a preemptive strike. They trusted them to construct failsafe launch-control devices… Utopian? Well, I wouldn’t call it that, not when you consider all the renegotiating we did. We had a Standing Consultative Commission on Einstein VI Violations, and I don’t think a week went by without a squawk from one side or the other.’

‘So you admit that the whole thing would have eventually broken down?’

‘We believed that the worst possible situation was the one that had existed – fifty thousand bombs held in check by terror and luck. Vice President Mother Mary Catherine had convinced us that nuclear arsenals were the great evil of the twentieth century, just as slavery had been the great evil of the nineteenth century. The weapons had to be banished.’

‘Sheer fantasy. People would always know how to create nuclear arms.’

‘People would always know how to create slaves, too.’

‘Russia was a huge country. What if the Soviets had squirreled away a few hundred bombs before Einstein VI was signed? Suppose they secretly developed a delivery system capable of penetrating your space forts? They could have demolished America with a bolt from the blue.’

‘Yes, but they would have assumed appalling risks.’

‘I don’t see any risks.’

‘Under Einstein VI, deterrence remained in effect.’

Bonenfant made a great show of stifling a grin. ‘Deterrence? Without weapons?’

Deterrence? thought George. Without weapons?

‘Yes. That’s what we called it, in fact. Weaponless deterrence.’

‘Now we’ve really gone through the looking glass.’

‘It’s like this. One day we said, “Isn’t there a significant difference between a nation that has never been a nuclear power and a nation that was once a nuclear power and is now disarmed?” And we answered, “Yes, there is. The second nation still has a deterrent. The deterrent is the capacity to rearm.”’

Deep ruts appeared in Justice Jefferson’s brow. ‘That sounds like a pretty flimsy deterrent to us, Mr Seabird.’

‘Not really a deterrent at all,’ said Justice Yoshinobu.

The witness raised his hands in a braking gesture. ‘Under Einstein VI every side maintained hardened, well-defended factories for the purpose of building new arsenals should an adversary be caught cheating. If I remember right, a typical lead time was four weeks to the production of eighty warheads plus cruise missiles to deliver them.’

In the tone of a teenager dealing with a naive little brother, Bonenfant said, ‘So the Soviets wipe out your cities and then sit around drinking vodka for four weeks, waiting for you to rearm and fight back?’

‘With weaponless deterrence, the Soviets do not attack in the first place. Given the space forts, the civil defense programs, the possibility of reciprocal cheating, the limited size of Russia’s clandestine arsenal, and America’s latent potential to retaliate, there are too many uncertainties.’

‘Sounds like the same old stalemate,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘This was a new kind of stalemate. It had the advantage of not occurring on the edge of an infinite abyss.’

‘Your regime was really just a method of buying time, wasn’t it?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘Time,’ echoed Seabird softly. ‘Good old time,’ he muttered.

‘Rather like the policies of my clients,’ said Bonenfant smoothly. ‘No further questions.’

Justice Jefferson removed her whalebone glasses and stared into blurry space. Her eyes darted rapidly, powered by agitated thoughts.

‘Is that abolition stuff really true?’ asked George.

‘It’s a load of camel dung,’ answered Brat.

‘He’s making it all up,’ asserted Wengernook.

‘The Scriptures say nothing about it,’ noted Sparrow.

‘If they’d given me the goddamn Post Office’s budget,’ said Overwhite, ‘I might have brought off a few miracles too.’

AQUINAS TO CALL FINAL WITNESS TOMORROW, Mount Christ-church proclaimed.

Hearing his name, Jared Seldin, a small, thin boy with hair suggesting some futuristic strain of wheat, wandered into the courtroom. When he grasped the Bible to be sworn in, its weight nearly knocked him flat. The witness’s face was as dark and vibrant as polished oak. He gave his age as eight.

Eight, thought George. Too old to believe in Santa Claus, old enough to ride a two-wheeler.

Aquinas approached the stand cautiously, as if trying to get a better view of a fawn. ‘What century would you have been born in, Jared?’

‘Let’s see, 2134… that’s the twenty-second century.’

‘And where would you have lived?’

‘Habitat-Seven.’

‘Is that a country?’

‘A what?’

‘A country.’

‘What’s a country?’ asked the boy.

‘Hard to explain… Now, how would you describe Habitat-Seven?’

‘Kind of an asteroid, I guess, all hollow inside, with a ramjet. It could go at speeds close to light, ’cause we had this big funnel in front that scooped up hydrogen atoms and sent them into this fusion engine, and then the atoms go whoosh out the back. We had plans to visit a star.’

‘What star?’

‘I forget. It had a planet.’

‘Did you like Habitat-Seven, as far as you can remember?’

‘It was a lot nicer than Antarctica.’

‘Yes, Jared, it must have been.’

‘I would have had a puppy. His name would have been Ralph. Why does everything have to be so sad, Mr Aquinas?’

‘I don’t know. Tell me, Jared, did the people in Habitat-Seven ever get into a war?’

‘Is that like a country?’

‘It’s… you know. A war.’

‘A war?’

‘A war.’

‘I don’t understand, Mr Aquinas.’

Bonenfant rose, his eyes hurling freshly sharpened daggers in Aquinas’s direction. ‘Your Honors, I move that all of this witness’s testimony be stricken. He possesses no expertise concerning nuclear weapons.’

‘Mr Aquinas, are you planning to take up a more relevant line of questioning?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘Jared Seldin’s testimony serves to underscore the defendants’ lack of vision,’ said Aquinas.

‘Lack of vision is not a crime, sir,’ said Justice Jefferson.

‘Negligence then,’ said the prosecutor. ‘Criminal negligence.’

‘The decision on this motion is mine, Mr Aquinas, not yours,’ said Justice Jefferson, ‘and I am now ruling that Jared Seldin’s testimony be removed from the record in toto.’

Brat and Wengernook toasted each other with cocoa mugs.

‘That concludes the case for the prosecution,’ said Aquinas in a small, gelded voice.

‘Case?’ said Brat. ‘What case?’

‘I didn’t hear any case,’ said Wengernook.

The chief prosecutor returned to his table wearing an inverted smile, as if fishhooks were tugging at the corners of his mouth.

‘The part about eliminating the weapons was interesting, don’t you think?’ said George.

‘Weaponless deterrence is like bodiless sex,’ said Wengernook. ‘It gets you nowhere.’

‘A grin without a cat,’ said Randstable.

‘Smoke,’ said Brat.

‘Particularly when your agency is inadequately funded,’ said Overwhite.

If Holly had lived, wondered George, would she have traveled to Mars?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

On the seventeenth of March, as the long polar night crept across the continent, creating glaciers of coal and bergs of pitch, Martin Bonenfant opened the case for the defense.

Throughout the courtroom lampwicks flared, fed by oil from killer whales and Weddell seals. Jagged shadows slithered around the glass booth. Bonenfant’s young face glowed orange, as if a candle burned inside his skull.

‘Call Major General Roger Tarmac.’

Fearlessly, Brat rose.

‘You’re gonna be great,’ said Wengernook.

‘Break a leg,’ said Randstable, who was setting up his little magnetic chess set.

‘Good luck,’ said George, whose mind was crowded with images of high-school students lowering intermediate-range missiles into a volcano.

Prompted by Bonenfant, Brat offered a rousing account of his Indiana boyhood, from which the tribunal learned that he had on two different occasions prevented school chums from drowning in the Muscatatuck River. Then came the Air Force Academy, a juggernaut progression through the ranks, and a brilliant career as a target nominator for the Strategic Air Command in the former city of Omaha.

‘Several days ago,’ said Bonenfant, ‘your name was mentioned during the testimony of Quentin Flood, founder of an organization called Generals Against Nuclear Arms.’

Brat polished his Distinguished Service Medal with his scopas glove. ‘He took exception to one of my articles, “Our Achilles Leg: Triad Theory and Land-Based Defenses.”’

‘That article identified a problem with your country’s Guardian Angel missiles,’ said Bonenfant.

‘America’s security has traditionally stood on three legs – the Triad. First, you had your submarine-launched ICBMs. Then you had your manned bombers. And the third force, which I called our Achilles Leg – that was the Guardian Angel land-based missiles.’

‘Why had they become an Achilles Leg?’

‘Because of the SS-60 – four hundred and thirty highly accurate Soviet ICBMs designed to remove our Guardian Angels in a first strike.’

‘A frightening development.’

‘After such an attack, an American President would have only two options – he could surrender, or he could retaliate against Soviet cities.’ Brat chopped the air with his hand. ‘But that would naturally bring reciprocal measures, and then he’s really in thick shit.’

‘And your solution was…?’

‘Missile Omega.’

‘The Omegas were effective against the new Soviet missiles?’

‘Such targets place a premium on response time. Omega is a fast mother. She also has terrific accuracy, long range, and ten high-yield warheads on her business end.’

‘Did you ever hear the argument that without a survivable basing mode’ – Bonenfant fixed his mouth in a condescending curve – ‘Omega had little retaliatory potential and was thus a socalled “first-strike weapon”?’

‘We’ve never given up on the basing problem.’

‘What modes have you studied?’

The general splayed his fingers and began ticking them off. ‘So far we’ve considered basing the missiles in blimps, underwater canisters, circular trenches, coal mines, and barges on the Mississippi River.’

‘You should have based them up your ass!’ a young woman called from the gallery. It took Justice Jefferson a full minute of gavel pounding to quell the laughter.

‘You had an unusual nickname around SAC,’ said Bonenfant.

‘I was the MARCH Hare,’ replied Brat. ‘Modulated Attacks in Response to Counterforce Hostilities.’

‘Some people have accused the MARCH Plan of being a warwinning scenario disguised as a deterrent.’

‘The very best way to prevent a nuclear war is to show that you believe you can win one.’

‘The court may have trouble—’

‘Forces that cannot win cannot deter. Is that clear?’

‘It’s certainly clear to me. No further questions.’ Bonenfant walked away from the stand with the self-satisfied air of a cat bringing a mouse to the back stoop.

Justice Jefferson invited the chief prosecutor to cross-examine.

‘He was swell, don’t you think?’ said Randstable, concentrating on the chessboard, where he was about to launch a king-side attack against himself.

‘A real pro,’ said Wengernook.

‘He certainly gave them the sort of data they’re looking for,’ said Overwhite.

Forces that cannot win cannot deter. George thought about this particular truth as hard as he could.

‘General Tarmac,’ said Aquinas, sidling up to the stand, ‘I’m bewildered by your Achilles Leg notion. Weren’t America’s landbased missiles kept in concrete silos?’

‘The new Soviet SS-60s had a hard-target kill capacity,’ Brat explained patiently.

‘Hard target?’

‘An ICBM silo is a hard target.’

‘As opposed to a soft target?’

‘Right. We worked long hours on silo hardness, but there are limits – two thousand pounds per square inch or so.’

‘In other words, this whole arms race can be traced to a lot of men trying to get it hard enough?’

‘You can joke about it, Prosecutor, but a vulnerable land-based force is no laughing matter.’

Aquinas assumed a posture of dismay. ‘But didn’t the Triad, being so redundant, allow for vulnerabilities to emerge from time to time?’

‘We had a serious parity problem when it came to land-based missiles,’ answered Brat. ‘We needed the Omegas.’

‘Are you saying that the Triad was ill-conceived, and America should have been mimicking Communist strategy instead?’

‘No, I’m saying that the Russians had more land-based missiles than we did. Why is that so hard to understand?’

‘And you really believed they were about to take out your own fixed ICBMs in a nuclear Pearl Harbor?’

‘This was on the low end of the probability curve, but we were still worried.’

‘And, before the Omega program, the Soviets could have expected to get away with such an attack?’

‘Right.’

‘After which you would have to surrender?’

Brat gulped down his annoyance. ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ asked Aquinas.

‘We would have been disarmed.’

‘Couldn’t the American President have used the two surviving legs to disarm the Soviets in turn?’

‘Be logical. If the SS-60s have already hit us, then their silos are empty.’

‘So you have to surrender?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I just explained that. We’ve been disarmed.’

‘So have the Soviets. You just explained that, too.’

‘They’ve probably kept a reserve force,’ Brat noted.

‘Then you could retaliate,’ Aquinas replied.

‘No. The enemy would protect the reserve.’

‘How?’

‘By launching it.’

‘So you have to surrender?’

‘Yes!’

‘Why?’

‘How many times do I have to say it?’ Brat snapped an icicle off the stand and crushed it. ‘We’ve been disarmed! Can’t you grasp the most elementary piece of strategic doctrine?’

‘Suppose that, instead of surrendering, the President ordered the strategic submarine fleet to destroy Soviet society?’

‘No President would answer a surgical strike with an all-out attack. That’s jumping far too many rungs on the escalation ladder.’

‘How many American civilians would have been killed in this surgical strike?’

‘Worst-case scenario is twenty-five million.’

‘Might not a President mistake such slaughter for an all-out attack?’

‘Not if he was willing to calm down for a minute and look at how those casualties occurred.’

The interview continued in this manner for over an hour, interrupted by a recess for a box lunch of hardboiled penguin eggs and blubber sandwiches, until Aquinas suddenly asked, ‘Wasn’t Omega in fact a first-strike weapon, General Tarmac?’

‘No,’ Brat replied.

‘What was it?’

‘It was a functional and credible second-strike retaliatory deterrent.’

‘A sure-fire deterrent?’

‘A functional and credible second-strike—’

‘No further questions,’ grunted the chief prosecutor, lurching away from the stand in a spasm of exasperation.

Brat rose, folding his arms across his chest. The interview seemed to have bestowed about twenty pounds on him. He sauntered back to the booth and asked, ‘So – how’d I do?’

‘Academy Award time,’ said Wengernook.

‘Hope I come off half as well,’ said Randstable, putting himself in check.

‘I hadn’t realized that forces that cannot win cannot deter,’ said George.

Overwhite was next on the stand. The oil lamps sprinkled flecks of bronze onto his snowy beard as he narrated his life’s story – the Foreign Service, the Diplomatic Corps, the State Department, and, finally, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. To George, Overwhite still seemed like a windbag, but he was obviously a resourceful and intelligent one, a windbag woven of the finest material.

‘Two treaties that you helped negotiate have been read into the record by the prosecution,’ said Bonenfant. ‘Evidently my learned opponent feels that your efforts did not go far enough.’

‘I can see Mr Aquinas’s point of view,’ replied Overwhite, examining himself for jaw tumors. ‘However, let me remind the tribunal that general and complete disarmament was always the stated goal of my agency. Unfortunately, the massive Soviet buildup made this impossible in our time.’

‘But your achievements were still impressive.’

‘Any man would be proud to have on his tombstone, “He negotiated STABLE I and STABLE II.”’

Design No. 4015, thought George. Vermont blue-gray.

After reviewing the details of both STABLE agreements, Bonenfant concluded that, ‘We might well have introduced them as exhibits for the defense.’

Overwhite agreed.

Bonenfant said, ‘Critics have charged that the STABLE treaties allowed the US military too much latitude with multiple warheads and cruise missiles.’

‘I can understand that sentiment,’ said Overwhite. ‘However, you should always remember that new systems become bargaining chips when you sit down at the negotiating table. They force the Soviets to get serious about reductions.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Justice Wojciechowski. ‘You seem to be saying that by declining to regulate particular weapons, you were serving the cause of arms control.’

‘My point is that technical innovation has diplomatic as well as military benefits.’

Bonenfant asked, ‘In retrospect, Mr Overwhite, could your agency have done anything more to prevent the recent war?’

‘If we knew for a fact that it was coming – yes, we would probably have pressed for certain confidence-building measures. For example, the hotline between Washington and Moscow badly needed upgrading.’

‘Well, nobody can blame you for not owning a crystal ball.’

‘I would have trouble empathizing with such an attitude.’

‘No further questions.’ Returning to the defense table, Bonenfant sniffed emphatically, as if his nose could barely accommodate all the victory it sensed in the sub-zero air.

‘Why does not regulating weapons serve the cause of arms control?’ George asked Brat.

‘Brian just explained that,’ the general replied.

‘This trial must be pretty boring for a guy like you,’ said Wengernook.

‘I’m not bored,’ said George.

The chief prosecutor approached the stand carrying a slab of ice under his arm. ‘Mr Overwhite, if complete disarmament was so dear to your agency’s heart, why didn’t you ever propose an abolition treaty?’

‘Well, as soon as you entertain radical proposals, you run into horrendous problems deciding which technologies to ban and which to allow. Take delivery systems…’

‘Why are delivery systems hard to negotiate?’ Aquinas knitted his momentous brow.

‘Because as warheads get smaller, almost anything can be a delivery system. A Wasp-13 manned bomber is obviously a delivery system, but what about a Piper Cub? What about a hot air balloon?’

‘So you never eliminated any missiles or bombers because you couldn’t tell them from hot air balloons?’

‘I’m saying it’s a real pain arriving at certain definitions.’

‘It’s a real pain having your face burned off, too.’

Bonenfant rose. ‘Your Honors, might we declare a moratorium on cheap shots?’

‘The court was not amused by that last remark, Mr Aquinas,’ said Justice Jefferson.

Aquinas made a modest bow and renewed the examination. ‘STABLE I dealt with missile launchers, right? Each side was granted eight hundred fifty-six submarine tubes and eleven hundred seventy-five hardened silos.’

‘Those were the limits.’

‘They don’t sound very limiting.’

‘If you let the numbers get too Spartan, Mr Aquinas, you increase the temptation to strike first.’

‘So it was inconceivable that you would ever negotiate the launchers down to zero?’

‘We felt it best to err on the side of safety.’

Aquinas held a seal-oil lamp near his ice slab. Graphs and statistics danced in the spectral glow. ‘STABLE II addressed the bombs themselves…’

‘We put ceilings on fractionation – twelve warheads per missile.’

‘According to my arithmetic, the number of warheads on both sides increased dramatically after STABLE II.’

‘But each missile carried only a dozen.’

‘Mr Overwhite, did you ever tell a Time magazine reporter, quote, “We must not saddle the economy with agreements negotiated just to impress the public”?’

‘I was thinking of those men who wouldn’t be showing up for work if, say, the Omega program were suddenly canceled,’ Overwhite knocked frost from his beard. ‘We had to keep the arms control process from, you know…’

‘Escalating?’

‘Falling prey to special interests.’

‘Let’s talk about bargaining chips.’

‘Very well.’

‘Could you please name three fully developed offensive weapon systems that your team relinquished at the negotiating table in exchange for concessions by the Soviets?’

‘We were always retiring bombs and missiles as they became obsolete.’

‘That’s not the question. I want you to name three systems that were bargained away.’

‘I can’t think of three off hand.’

‘Can you name two?’

‘Not two exactly, no.’

‘Can you name one?’

‘Well, as you can readily imagine, once a new weapon is actually in production, it becomes more valuable as a deterrent than as a chip.’

‘Mr Overwhite, it seems to me that, when all is said and done, you and the arms builders were really in the same line of work.’

‘Your bitterness is quite understandable, Mr Aquinas. Your conclusion, however, is not.’

The chief prosecutor shuddered theatrically and told the court that he had no more questions.

‘That was an excellent point about general and complete disarmament,’ said Randstable, tipping over his king to concede defeat to himself.

‘He was in charge all the way,’ said Wengernook.

From the gallery a red-faced old man called, ‘Hey, Overwhite, here’s a weapon for you to control!’ He stood up and hurled an icicle shaped like an independently targetable warhead. The malicious little cone zoomed through the frosty air, missing the negotiator’s head by an inch.

That was uncalled for, George decided.

The next morning the court heard the autobiography of Dr William Randstable, who had worn almost as many hats in his life as there were in Theophilus Carter’s inventory. Chess prodigy. Inventor of the popular computer game Launch on Warning (the royalties had put him through M.I.T.). Author of the bestselling science fiction novel, The Dark Side of the Sun. Youngest whiz kid at the think tank known as Lumen Corporation. Head of the Missile Accuracy Division at Sugar Brook National Laboratory.

‘I’m impressed already,’ said Wengernook.

‘They don’t hang guys like this,’ said Brat.

‘I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be smart,’ said George.

Randstable finished explaining how he had checkmated a Russian grand master who was also a KGB agent.

Bonenfant said, ‘Now during your early days at the Lumen think tank, you—’

‘Think tank – is that a kind of weapon?’ asked Justice Yoshinobu.

‘No, not a weapon, your Honor,’ said Randstable.

‘I picture a Sherman tank with a disembodied human brain inside,’ said the judge.

‘That’s actually an interesting idea…’ Randstable pulled off his horn-rimmed glasses and chewed contemplatively on the ear piece. ‘The electroneural interface would be the trickiest—’

‘The what?’ asked Justice Gioberti.

‘Wetware modem,’ said Randstable. ‘Interface is, now that I think about it, a misnomer, since you’d be removing the cranium and stripping out the eyes, nose, and other material.’ He elaborated for several minutes, until Justice Wojciechowski interrupted to remind him that he was on trial for his life. ‘Oh, sorry,’ said the former whiz kid, ‘Excuse me.’

‘Tell us something about Lumen,’ said Bonenfant.

‘Our group analyzed the logical difficulties raised by the superpower arsenals. The epistemological pitfalls of assured destruction, for example, or the tautologies encountered while climbing the ladder of escalation.’

‘What did you do about these problems?’ asked Justice Gioberti.

‘We thought about them.’

‘A nerve-wracking job, I imagine,’ said Bonenfant.

‘God, yes. When Sugar Brook Lab made me an offer, I jumped at it.’

‘I believe you directed their Inertial Guidance Project.’

‘Whenever a nuclear missile came my way, I made it more accurate.’

‘How accurate?’

‘Imagine Robin Hood standing in Nottingham Square and shooting the apple off William Tell’s kid in Switzerland.’

Bonenfant issued a slow-motion smile. ‘What was the ultimate result of inertial guidance?’

‘A safer world,’ said Randstable.

‘A safer world?’

‘Sounds paradoxical, huh? But when you know for sure you can stand on the old pitcher’s mound and throw a strike – that is, when you’re certain of taking out any given silo or command post – the amount of overkill you need goes way, way down.’

The chief counsel handed his client a large piece of sealskin framed in bone. Two line graphs were painted on one side of the membrane. ‘So as missiles become more accurate, they become less destructive?’ Bonenfant asked.

‘Exactly. Now as you can see, ever since the early sixties, megatonnage has steadily decreased in both America and the Soviet Union.’

‘How did your guidance device work?’

The years dropped from Randstable like a heavy overcoat. He was Willie the Wunderkind again. ‘The basic unit was a beryllium ball chock full of gyros and accelerometers,’ he said with the zest of a boy discussing electric trains. ‘Now, my idea was to float the thing inside another ball filled with a nonconducting liquid having neutral buoyancy. Presto! All during flight, the gyros keep warm and steady in their hydrocarbon bath. A human embryo is protected in much the same way.’

‘You also supervised the Smart Warheads Project.’

‘This approach allowed even greater targeting precision. Each warhead got its own personal computer, right? It could then compare, pixel by pixel, a radar picture of the target terrain with a stored reference image.’

George liked the word pixel. It sounded like something an elf would use for self-gratification.

‘Did Sugar Brook develop the ground-launched Homing Hawk ballistic missile interceptor?’ Bonenfant asked.

‘Yes,’ said Randstable.

George remembered that he had been planning to tell Holly a story about an elf who casts a golden shadow.

‘I guess it was a great day when you proved that a Homing Hawk could destroy an incoming warhead,’ said Bonenfant.

‘We broke out the champagne and got a little bombed.’

‘Your Homing Hawk was actually a forerunner of the spacebased defenses Mr Seabird praised so lavishly in his testimony on Einstein VI.’

‘I guess it was.’

‘You must feel good about that.’

‘I feel good about all of Sugar Brook’s accomplishments.’

‘The prosecution, I am sure, will suggest that Sugar Brook was a dealer in the death trade, a cornucopia of demonic devices… I apologize if I’m stealing your rhetoric, Mr Aquinas.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ said the chief prosecutor.

‘What business were you really in, Dr Randstable?’

‘The business of making nuclear weapons obsolete.’

‘No further questions.’

Bonenfant danced merrily back to the defense table.

‘That was good, when he mentioned making them more accurate,’ said Brat.

‘The part about making them obsolete, that was good too,’ said George.

After removing his right glove, Aquinas ran an extended index finger along the comforting decline on the sealskin graph. ‘An impressive picture.’

‘I think so,’ said Randstable.

‘Do you truly believe that the megatonnage would have just kept dropping?’ the chief prosecutor asked.

‘I do.’

‘Down past the extinction threshold?’

‘That’s what our extrapolations suggested.’

‘There’s another side to this accuracy business, isn’t there?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘As missiles become more accurate, they also become more usable.’

‘Yes, but if you ever get to that, it’s better to have usable missiles than unusable ones.’

‘Dr Randstable, wasn’t it rather bizarre to be perfecting all these clever technologies knowing that their purpose was essentially psychological – that if they were actually fired, then the world would be better off if they didn’t work?’

‘Pessimism had no place at Sugar Brook.’

‘Tell me honestly, did you ever pretend that a missile had been successfully tested even though it had gone down in flames?’

‘No.’

‘I mean, so long as the Soviets believed the thing worked, its deterrent value remained the same. We could have built our whole arsenal out of uncooked spaghetti, right?’

‘My client has already answered that question,’ said Bonenfant, rising.

‘Let it go, Mr Aquinas,’ said Justice Jefferson.

When George glanced toward the gallery, he saw that several spectators had opened their veins with razor blades. The steaming blood spelled out SMART WARHEADS ARE A STUPID IDEA in tall, dripping characters.

‘You must have been happy when Sugar Brook became the prime contractor for the Homing Hawk interceptor,’ said Aquinas.

‘Well, sure. I mean, we were in this life-and-death struggle with Winco Associates and General Heuristics.’

‘And then, when you got the Hawks to work, you celebrated with champagne?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Newsweek reported that you drank to “a bad night in the Kremlin.”’

‘To “a sleepless night in the Kremlin,” actually.’

‘You didn’t foresee any sleepless nights in the White House?’

‘I can’t grasp your logic.’

‘Well, each Hawk you deployed would have further blunted Russia’s retaliatory capability, until mutual deterrence was virtually nonexistent. Thinking that America was about to strike first, the Soviets might have struck first.’

‘When America had a nuclear monopoly, we did not strike first.’

Aquinas pulled a folder from one of the evidence piles and shoved it into Randstable’s lap. ‘I would refer you to Document 476, the 1951 edition of the SPASM, the Single Plan for Aligning the Services of the Military. As you know, it calls for the complete pulverization of the Soviet Union – the nuclear strip mining of an entire nation – in response to conventional aggression against Western Europe.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘To me, Dr Randstable, everything was a long time ago. No further questions.’

The engineer gangled his way back to the booth and asked, ‘Well, what’s the verdict?’

‘You stood your ground,’ said Wengernook.

‘I think we’re on top of this thing,’ said Brat.

‘I couldn’t follow the part about the embryo,’ said George.

During lunch – the defendants could choose between killer whale chowder and cold boiled skua – Randstable showed George some chess openings, then challenged him to a game, offering the tomb inscriber a rook advantage and the first move. George had not played since junior high school, but he thought it might be fun to lose to somebody who had beaten a Russian grand master.

Reverend Sparrow testified next. In a voice that blasted its way into icy nooks and crannies never before visited by human speech, the evangelist told the tribunal how, as an adolescent mired in ‘a slimy pit of drugs and fornication,’ he had one night reached into his parents’ collection of X-rated videocassertes and inadvertently grasped a Bible. He began reading it. He could not put it down. A year later he was attending the Coral Gables Theological Seminary. Before the decade was out, his cable television channel had more subscribers than any except the one sponsored by Crotch magazine, and he had become the youngest person ever to chair the celebrated right-wing Committee on the Incipient Evil.

‘This guy makes me nervous,’ said Wengernook.

‘No, no, it’s good he’s on the team,’ said Brat. ‘We need a religious component.’

‘Your bestselling book,’ said Bonenfant, ‘Christians Will Come Through the First Strike, argued that as the millennium approached, certain Biblical prophecies would be fulfilled. How do your interpretations square with the recent Soviet-American exchange?’

‘The Hebrew prophets were right on the money.’ The evangelist unzipped his scopas gear and pulled his little Bible from the vest of his three-piece suit. ‘As you know, that war destroyed the temple at Jerusalem, a prelude to what Christians call the Perfect Exile. In the Perfect Exile, the church – those who have accepted Jesus – is cleaved into seven segments and transported to the far corners of the earth. Which explains why I’m here. If you look in the North Pole and other remote places, you will find boatloads of Christians.’

‘And after the Perfect Exile?’

‘More explosions – though of course they cannot touch the church. So destructive are these bombs that the survivors succumb to a man who promises peace. But who is he? The Antichrist, that’s who.’

For the first time in his life, George realized what an intrinsically boring religion Unitarianism was.

‘I’m not sure where all this is leading us,’ said Justice Jefferson.

Sparrow responded by raising his voice. ‘For seven years the Antichrist provokes a series of major nuclear conflicts, including the hundred-thousand-megaton Battle of Armageddon! But then the Son of Man returns in time to prevent total annihilation!’

‘Is that pretty much it?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘The present world vanishes, the Last Judgment occurs, and a New Heaven and Earth appear!’

‘Anything else?’

‘Eternity,’ said Sparrow quietly.

‘Last week,’ said Bonenfant, ‘former Vice President Mother Mary Catherine accused you of measuring a nation’s Christianity by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal.’

‘There’s no such passage in any of my writings.’

‘But you do advocate peace through strength.’

‘If you study the Scriptures with an open mind’ – Sparrow tapped his Bible – ‘you will realize that they urge the United States to regain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, a nation that the prophet Ezekiel calls Magog.’

‘When I read your books, I saw immediately that you regard nuclear war as a threat that all Christians must work to overcome.’

‘Yes, but we shall succeed only through a willingness to bear the sword of God. The Bible teaches that, in a world of fallen men, military force is essential for social order.’

‘Well, it shouldn’t be a crime to want social order. No further questions.’

‘I’ve never heard that “world of fallen men” hypothesis before,’ said Randstable as he inflicted a fool’s mate on George. ‘Intriguing.’

‘We could have used this guy at SAC,’ said Brat. ‘Our public relations director was a washout.’

Are we going to become fallen men? asked George’s spermatids. I don’t know, he replied.

Aquinas approached the stand without enthusiasm. The Devil’s advocate, the Lord’s prosecutor – equally thankless jobs. ‘Leafing through your books, I’m struck by all the charts comparing American and Soviet military strength. Don’t these statistics take us pretty far afield from theology?’

‘I wanted Christians to understand that the enemy had acquired the edge in every category – throw-weight, conventional forces, you name it. We had to save America while there was still time.’

‘Given that America’s demise had already been revealed to the prophets, wouldn’t it be blasphemous to try averting it?’

‘God has a plan for us,’ the evangelist explained.

‘The title of your last book, Deals With the Devil: A Christian Looks at the STABLE Treaties, speaks for itself. Obviously you do not believe in arms control.’

‘I do believe in arms control. What I don’t believe in is appeasement.’ Sparrow’s smile was so sweet it threatened to rot his teeth. ‘After all, Mr Aquinas, the Soviet Union is a police state, isn’t it? There is no way to tell what agreements they’re breaking or what bombs they’re building.’

‘If it was impossible to know exactly how many weapons the Soviets had, why did you publish charts showing exactly how many weapons the Soviets had?’

‘Those statistics were compiled by the Committee on the Incipient Evil.’

Aquinas went to a document pile, fished out two paperback books, and opened the one with the mushroom cloud rising over Golgotha. ‘Now, on page one hundred forty-three of God’s Megatons you say, “The approach of Armageddon should cause not fear but joy. For Armageddon is the Lord’s war to cleanse the earth of wickedness.” I wonder how many Christians read this passage and found themselves hoping for a nuclear exchange?’ He consulted the second book. ‘And then, in Christians Will Come Through the First Strike, you quote Zephaniah 1:15, “A day of wrath is that day, a day of thick black clouds, a day of battle alarm against fortified cities, against battlements on high.” You add, “Doesn’t this sound like our second-strike weapons defeating the antiballistic missile system of the Soviet Union?”’

‘I wanted to reveal that, if America were wise enough to avoid the disarmament trap, then the Son of Man could use our arsenal to bring violent judgment against those in Magog who reject the free gift of salvation.’

‘Jesus would do that?’

‘His First Coming was as the Lamb of God, His Second will be as the Lion.’

‘Oh,’ said Aquinas, rolling his eyes into his huge skull. ‘No more questions.’

‘Knows his Bible, doesn’t he?’ said Wengernook.

‘I always liked the Sermon on the Mount,’ said George. ‘Job has some memorable parts too.’

‘I thought you were a Unitarian,’ said Brat,

‘Jesus was ahead of His time,’ said Randstable.

At nine o’clock the next morning, Bonenfant called Wengernook to testify.

‘Well, men, here we go,’ said the assistant defense secretary, nervously saluting his co-defendants.

‘Just remember, history is on our side,’ said Brat. ‘Strength made the Soviets move cautiously.’

‘Watch out for Aquinas’s left hook,’ said Randstable.

Once on the stand, Wengernook pulled cigarettes and matches from his scopas suit. Justice Jefferson gave him permission to light up.

Bonenfant said, ‘The prosecution has introduced several documents authored by you, including an address titled “The Soviet Plan for Nuclear Victory” delivered to the Massachusetts Medical Society. Were the Soviets really planning on victory?’

‘The evidence was overwhelming,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match, missed the cigarette by inches. ‘Their arsenal was geared to a protracted nuclear war, and they also had an extensive civil defense program. By the time I joined the current administration, Russia had fully embraced the ugly concept of a winner.’

‘So America had to configure her own deterrent accordingly?’

‘Not only was mutual assured destruction immoral, it had outlived its usefulness. We needed a policy of damage limitation and force modernization, plus a menu of realistic strategic options. In short, a transition from MAD to MARCH.’

‘Some people were troubled that MARCH necessitated a large increase in warheads.’

‘Under MAD, you could get away with, oh, I don’t know – a couple hundred bombs.’ At last Wengernook made match and cigarette connect. ‘But when your goal is damage limitation, you require a much larger arsenal.’

‘I’m not sure I understand this “damage limitation” business,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

That makes two of us, George thought. That makes four hundred million of us, his spermatids added.

It took Wengernook most of the morning to clarify the various meanings of damage limitation. ‘So you see, your Honors,’ he concluded, ‘in the awful event that deterrence fails, you want to remove targets selectively. Your missiles must send the right message.’

‘What message is that?’ asked Justice Yoshinobu.

‘“We’re not trying to annihilate you, we’re trying to save ourselves. That’s why we’re hitting only your silos, bomber fields, submarine pens, and warhead factories.”’ Wengernook took a prolonged drag on his latest cigarette. ‘Hence, the enemy is inspired to refrain from a massive attack.’

‘So in its early phases such a conflict leads to better communication between the superpowers?’ asked Justice Gioberti.

‘If a war ever started, God forbid, the Soviets would immediately see they had nothing to gain by moving beyond surgical strikes,’ answered Wengernook.

‘They would be deterred from escalating?’

‘Exactly. Their only option would be peace.’

Bonenfant allowed the word peace to linger for several beats, then announced that he had no further questions. Justice Jefferson ordered a lunch recess.

‘I’m glad he got immorality in there,’ said Brat.

‘The line about peace was good too,’ said George.

His bullet wound throbbed crazily as he tried to recall Victor Seabird’s testimony. A complicated test ban, is that what the old man had negotiated? And there was something about weaponsgrade material…

‘Secretary Wengernook,’ Aquinas began after the break, ‘is it fair to say that the defense of Western Europe lay at the heart of America’s involvement with nuclear weapons?’

‘Given the superiority of the Warsaw Pact’s conventional forces, tactical deployments were essential to NATO’s security.’

‘Some observers believed that the new intermediate-range missiles in Europe forced the Soviets to adopt a policy of launchon-warning.’

‘You must consider the stabilizing aspects of launch-on-warning.’ Wengernook jettisoned his cigarette. ‘When a nation puts her missiles on a so-called “hair trigger,” her military leaders feel much less threatened.’

‘Because they know they won’t lose those forces in a preemptive strike?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they’re less likely to do something foolish?’

‘Right.’

‘Like launching on warning?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Tell the tribunal about no-first-use.’

‘This was the proposed doctrine whereby NATO would never be first to fire nuclear weapons, even in the face of a total defeat by the Warsaw Pact’s tank divisions.’

Aquinas retrieved several items from one of the document piles. ‘Glancing through your writings, I see that you were opposed to a no-first-use pledge.’

‘It would have severely eroded deterrence. I much prefer a policy that says, “NATO will never shoot any nuclear missiles unless attacked.”’

‘By conventional weapons.’

‘It also had a credibility problem. The whole thing would have gone out the window as soon as the Soviet blitzkrieg began.’

‘Let me get this straight. The problem with no-first-use was that it had just enough credibility to invite a grand scale assault, but not enough credibility to hold up during one?’

‘You should never let the enemy know your intentions.’

‘Is that why in this issue of Strategic Doctrine Quarterly, Document 794, you praised President Truman for introducing something called “The Hiroshima Factor”?’

‘Well, Hiroshima certainly gave us an advantage over the Soviets in the ambiguity area,’ said Wengernook, leafing through the document in question. ‘They never knew just what we would do.’

‘So by rejecting no-first-use, America could retain its superiority in ambiguity?’

‘I’m trying to give a serious interview here.’

‘Your 1992 commencement address at the Air Force Academy, Document 613, includes the famous remark that, quote, “In a nuclear war our forces must prevail over the Soviets and achieve an early cessation of hostilities on terms favorable to the United States.” Unquote. What does it mean to “prevail” in a nuclear war, Secretary?’

‘It means absorbing a first strike and then retaliating decisively.’

‘How would you characterize a country that has absorbed a first strike?’

‘The industrial base is largely intact, the command structure is functioning, and deterrence has been restored.’

‘What about the civilian population?’

‘A significant percentage has survived.’

‘And a significant percentage hasn’t survived. Is this what you people call “acceptable losses”?’

‘Occasionally we used that term.’

‘Five million people killed, is that acceptable?’

‘Well, we had that twenty million figure staring us in the face.’

‘What twenty million figure?’

‘The casualties Russia suffered in the Second World War.’

‘A troubling sum. You were losing the acceptable losses race.’

Justice Wojciechowski asked, ‘Mr Wengernook, may I assume that no losses were acceptable to you personally?’

‘That goes without saying.’ The defendant drew a pair of mirrored sunglasses from his scopas suit and put them on. ‘Acceptable losses is a very abstract concept. It only comes up in strategic discussions.’

‘I hate to be a Monday-morning quarterback,’ said Aquinas, ‘but the United States didn’t “prevail,” did it? Your menu got used up, the Soviets neglected to offer favorable terms, the SPASM was implemented, and the human race disappeared. Now, in light of these events, do you still believe your plans were more moral than mutual assured destruction?’

‘There is a world of ethical difference between offensive warfighting plans and preventive war-fighting plans.’

‘Is that why winning was an ugly concept when the Soviets thought about it and a realistic option when you did?’

‘We had to live in the world as it was, Prosecutor, not as we would have liked it to be.’

Aquinas moved so close to Wengernook that his breath fogged the defendant’s sunglasses. ‘But you made the world as it was! Your strategic menu threatened the Soviets from all sides! Your theater forces menaced them! Your Multiprongs taunted them! Your Omegas—!’

‘“If you would have peace, prepare for war,”’ Wengernook quoted somberly. ‘Appius Claudius the Blind.’

‘And if you would have war, you also prepare for war!’

George had seen this scene before, on movie screens – the prosecutor trying to break down the defendant.

‘I submit that your strategies had the Soviets frightened to death!’ Aquinas persisted. ‘I submit that the best hope they saw was a quick, unexpected decapitation of the American command structure!’

But this was not the movies. This was the post-exchange environment, where everybody is extinct and assistant defense secretaries are as unyielding as Vermont granite.

‘No, you’re wrong,’ said Wengernook wearily. ‘That Soviet Spitball attack was completely unmotivated.’

Aquinas was at the bench, standing before the little frozen missile exhibits. ‘When was this arms race supposed to end, Secretary?’ He kicked the ice arsenal. ‘When?’

‘An unmotivated, naive, pointless, reckless, suicidal attack,’ said Wengernook. ‘Everybody knows that Spitball cruise missiles are not good for first strikes.’

‘When?’ shouted Mother Mary Catherine from the gallery.

‘How many times can you fantasize all these battle plans before wanting to get the whole thing over with?’ Aquinas demanded, kicking missiles. ‘How many times can you go through the door marked DETERRENCE before you end up in a concrete bunker turning launch keys?’

Wengernook ripped off his sunglasses and said, ‘To this day, I don’t understand the enemy’s reasoning. Spitballs are second-strike weapons. Not first-strike – second-strike. Is that clear?’

For the next ten minutes Aquinas kicked missiles and shouted rhetorical questions, Wengernook patiently explained why Spitballs were useless in first strikes, Mother Mary Catherine released balloons with WHEN? painted on their sides, and Justice Jefferson made halfhearted attempts to restore order. Finally a haggard chief prosecutor announced that he had no further questions.

Back in the booth, Wengernook received warm congratulations and firm handshakes from Brat, Randstable, Overwhite, and Sparrow. He approached George and gave him an amiable slap on the shoulder. ‘This sort of testimony must sound awfully technical to you, huh?’ asked the defense secretary.

‘I didn’t hear you say how many times you could go through the door marked DETERRENCE,’ George replied. His tone was more acid than he intended, but it sounded right. ‘The crowd drowned you out.’

‘Defending a country is a damn sight harder than sticking a few words on a tombstone,’ said Wengernook between locked teeth. A WHEN? balloon bounced off the booth door. ‘You’re going to testify tomorrow, aren’t you? Just remember, we’re with you one hundred percent.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

George’s spermatids trembled as his advocate left the defense table and walked through the mid-morning darkness. It won’t be that bad, he told them. I merely have to explain that I was not involved with smart warheads, damage limitation, any of it.

Bonenfant said, ‘The defense calls George—’

‘No!’ a familiar voice piped up from the back of the courtroom. ‘The defense calls me!’

Theophilus Carter ambled forward stomping on WHEN? balloons and carrying a steaming cup of tea. His scopas suit was diamond-patterned like a harlequin’s tights, and its utility belt sagged with daggers and pistols from the costume racks of the Mad Tea Party. ‘I don’t normally arm myself so heavily,’ he explained, sipping tea, ‘but I understand there are war criminals present. Say, shouldn’t somebody ask me to remove my hat?’ He darted a blobby finger toward Justice Jefferson. ‘Aren’t you in charge of that?’

‘I don’t care what you do with your hat, sir,’ she replied, ‘Can anyone tell me who this is?’

‘Dr Theophilus Carter, unadmitted tailor and inventor,’ said Aquinas, rising. ‘We hired him to deliver Document 919 to the defendant Paxton.’

‘Why did you retain the services of such an unbalanced person?’ Justice Jefferson demanded.

‘Oh, I’m highly balanced,’ asserted the MAD Hatter. He set the teacup in the brim of his hat and did a pirouette. ‘It’s the strategic forces that are unbalanced.’

‘We were unaware of his condition at the time,’ Aquinas explained.

‘You don’t really want this man testifying, do you, Mr Bonenfant?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘But I have evidence to give,’ said the Hatter. ‘I can prove that George is innocent.’

Bonenfant uncurled his index finger, aimed it at the client in question, wiggled it. George left the glass booth and joined his advocate in a niche jammed with documents relating to STABLE II.

‘Any reason not to hear what this fellow has to say?’ whispered Bonenfant.

‘He’s a madman,’ said George. ‘Can you put a madman on the stand?’

Swearing in Theophilus Carter was the greatest challenge of the court usher’s career. After fifteen minutes of semantic circumlocution, the job was done.

‘Are you acquainted with the defendant Paxton?’ Bonenfant asked.

‘George and I go back a long way,’ the Hatter replied. ‘I knew him before his secondary spermatocytes were failing to become spermatids. May I give my testimony now?’

‘That’s what you’re doing.’

‘This whole thing would go a lot quicker if I told you what to say. Ask me, “When did you first meet the defendant?”’

Bonenfant’s upper teeth entered into violent contact with his lower ones. ‘Er – when did you first meet—’

‘When he came in to get his free scopas suit. Ask me how much the prosecution paid me to make it.’

‘How much did the prosecution pay you—’

‘Objection!’ The Hatter shot up as if attached to a delivery system. ‘Leading the witness! The prosecution did not pay me to make the suit. But they did bribe me with a wonderful flying shop.’ He flopped back into the stand. ‘Ask me what happened after I told George he had to sign a sales contract implicating himself in the arms race.’

‘The tribunal will please note that my client was entrapped by the prosecution. Now, Mr Carter, what happened after you told George he had to sign a sales—’

‘He signed it, took the suit, and left.’

‘What happened next?’

‘I became curious. Would anyone have behaved as George did – accepting a free suit even after being told that this technology undermined deterrence? So I filled my hat with unsigned contracts and flew off in my shop. I figured that if fifty people refused to sign, then George was an unusually negligent person, and I was obliged to surrender his confession to the prosecution.’

‘Did you find fifty such people?’

After removing the teacup from the brim, Theophilus flipped his hat over and reached inside. His hand emerged with a stack of scopas suit sales contracts. ‘These are the first two hundred I gave out. Every one is signed. All right, I said to myself. I’ll settle for forty-five refusals. No luck. Thirty? Impossible, Ten? Nope. Time was running out. The warheads had started landing. One! If one person is less negligent than George Paxton, I’ll hand over the evidence of his guilt.’

‘And did you find such a person?’

‘Ask me if I found such a person.’

‘I just did.’

‘You did? What a coincidence – I found one too! Ask me whether this person was a man or a woman.’

‘Was this person a man or—’

‘That’s irrelevant! What’s relevant is that only one person on earth was willing to worry about the impact of scopas suits on deterrence.’

‘Your Honor, I object,’ said Aquinas. ‘Dr Carter did not approach every person on earth.’

As Justice Jefferson instructed the stenographers to delete the witness’s last remark, Theophilus unhooked a pineapple-type fragmentation grenade from his belt and began biting the cast iron case.

‘Ask me why I’m insane,’ he said.

‘Why are you insane?’ the advocate responded.

Theophilus pulled the pin from the grenade – nothing happened – and used it to stir his tea. If admitted, he explained, he would have been part of the abolition regime. His job would have been to sit in a rubber room in the Pentagon all day, thinking about strategic doctrine. It was assumed that people who took this job would go crazy. They were the heroes of the twenty-first century. Their madness was their gift to the human species; because of the Hatter and his fellow martyrs, humanity would never forget how close it had come to suicide.

‘Ask me what job I have now,’ said Theophilus.

‘What job—’

‘History rehabilitation. Long hours, low pay, bad smells. ‘Again he reached into his hat, this time coming up with a stack of computer software disks. ‘Now this program here,’ he said, ‘this is Marcus Aurelius. And this one will go into Mahatma Gandhi’s brain. At one time, all of history heartily approved of what this tribunal is trying to do. But then, after George saved my life—’

‘Saved your life?’ said Bonenfant, pouncing on the testimonial. ‘How did he come to save your life?’

‘I’m asking the questions around here! Ask me how George came to save my life.’

‘How did George—’

‘Somebody was going to shoot me. Ask me who.’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t ask! It would not help Tarmac’s case one bit.’

‘I wasn’t really going to shoot him,’ Brat explained to his codefendants. ‘I just wanted to scare him into giving me his shop.’

‘It flies – is that what he said?’ asked Randstable.

‘Twenty-first century know-how,’ said Brat.

‘Love to see the schematics,’ said Randstable.

Theophilus took more software from his hat. ‘After George saved my life, I realized that the framers of the McMurdo Sound Agreement had been overstepping their authority. He’s a fine fellow, old George is. You should see the witnesses I’ve got lined up.’ The Hatter waved a disk around. ‘Look! Socrates will testify in his defense! And Saint Francis of Assisi! Joan of Arc! Jesus Christ Himself is prepared to take the stand on George’s behalf… Yes, the same Jesus Christ who said, “But whosoever shall nuke thy capital city, turn to him thy best seaport also.”’

George noticed that Reverend Sparrow’s face was rapidly shifting toward the purple end of the spectrum.

Aquinas rose and said, ‘I move that all of this witness’s babblings be stricken.’

‘Mr Carter has stated that my client was entrapped,’ said Bonenfant. ‘That is vital testimony.’

While the president of the court deliberated, Theophilus refilled his hat with software and sales contracts.

‘The testimony will stand,’ said Justice Jefferson. ‘However, we do not wish to hear any more of it. The prosecution may cross-examine.’

‘We decline to cross-examine,’ said Aquinas.

‘Oh? Why?’

‘Because life is short, your Honor.’

As when a fever seizes the brain and makes things grotesquely smaller, larger, fatter, or thinner, so did the perspectives afforded by the stand disorient George. The audience, a tame and predictable creature when viewed from within the booth, now looked ferocious. The judges had acquired a terrifying hostility. The court usher was stark and unforgiving.

‘What did you do for a living?’ Bonenfant asked.

‘I inscribed tombstones,’ George answered. ‘And sold them.’

‘Did this work have anything to do with national defense?’

‘No.’ So far, so good, he thought.

Bonenfant retrieved Document 919 from a nearby evidence pile. ‘The prosecution’s entire case against you seems to rest on this sales contract. Is that your signature at the bottom?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Did Theophilus Carter insist that you read these statements carefully before signing?’

‘No.’

‘Did you read them carefully?’

‘Not really.’

‘According to the contract, you believed that scopas suits were encouraging America’s leaders to pursue a policy of nuclear brinksmanship.’

‘I didn’t even know what “nuclear brinksmanship” was. I’m still not sure.’

‘Did you believe, as the contract says, that scopas suits were distracting people from the real issues – STABLE talks, the MARCH Plan, no-first-use?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘This document was putting words in your mouth, wasn’t it?’

Commotion at the prosecution table. ‘And Mr Bonenfant is putting words in his client’s mouth,’ Aquinas asserted.

‘Ask another question,’ said Justice Jefferson.

‘To tell you the truth, your Honors’ – Bonenfant ambled back to the defense table – ‘my client is so palpably innocent that I cannot think of a single additional question to ask him. He’s yours, Mr Aquinas.’

As the chief prosecutor charged forward, the butterflies in George’s stomach began producing larvae.

‘You have told the court that you used to sell tombstones,’ Aquinas began.

God, has he nailed me already? No, I did sell tombstones. ‘That’s right.’

‘Was it your practice to have customers sign sales contracts without reading them?’

‘No.’

‘And yet you are asking the court to believe that you signed a scopas suit contract without reading it?’

‘I did read it, sort of. It confused me.’

‘“I hearby confess to my complicity in the nuclear arms race.” That sounds like plain English to my ears.’

A vulture expert. Everything would be fine as long as a vulture expert showed up. ‘It was the other parts that confused me.’

‘Do you or do you not understand the words, “I hereby confess to my complicity in the nuclear arms race”?’

George knew that his voice was going to sound weak and defeated. ‘I understand them.’ Weak, defeated. ‘I wanted my little girl to have a scopas suit. Is that so terrible?’

The chief prosecutor placed the contract at arm’s length, as if it harbored an infectious disease. ‘Can you point to a single action on your part that would lead the tribunal to doubt your negligence?’

‘Well, not exactly. No. But if you heard Mr Carter’s testimony, then you know that just about everybody else—’

‘Just about everybody else is not on trial here.’

Aquinas took a long, deliberate stroll around the prosecution table. George twitched like a skewered moth.

‘I’m curious, Mr Paxton,’ the chief prosecutor said at last. ‘How do you feel about your co-defendants?’

‘How do I feel about them?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re my friends.’

‘Good friends?’

‘We play poker. Reverend Sparrow once saved me from some dangerous ensigns. Dr Randstable has been showing me the basic chess openings. General Tarmac helped me find a fertility clinic.’

‘So you like them?’

‘Sure I like them. They certainly aren’t war criminals.’

‘And how do you feel about their ideas?’

‘Their what?’ George asked politely.

‘Their ideas.’

‘If I’d been the one in Washington, I probably couldn’t have done any better.’

Aquinas scowled. ‘Again I put the question to you. How do you feel about your co-defendants’ ideas?’

The high-school students were back in George’s mind, merrily kicking off the abolition regime. Plop! went the Soviet SS-90 intermediate-range missile into the glowing magma of Mount Erebus. He thought: our case is going well, my friends did an excellent job of defending themselves, and now I’m about to blow it. Still, this is a court of law. I touched a Bible and swore to give the truth. ‘I guess I’d have to say…’

His intestines writhed around each other. Overwhite will never speak to me again. Randstable won’t teach me any more openings. Sparrow will stop praying for me. Brat will hate me forever…

‘I guess I’d have to say that my friends’ ideas were pretty bad.’

‘Pretty bad?’

‘Yes. Bad. Bad ideas. Terrible, in fact.’

Aquinas began warming up for a gigantic smile. ‘Why do you suppose your co-defendants spent so much time and energy on these bad ideas?’

‘That’s hard to say.’

The prosecutor’s smile grew. ‘Can you guess?’

‘Well, I suppose that thinking about bad ideas is more interesting and exciting than… you know.’

‘Than what?’

‘You know.’

‘Abolishing the weapons?’

‘Yes,’ sighed George.

Aquinas’s smile reached full potential. ‘No further questions,’ he said, slapping the sales contract on the bench.

A new and particularly bitter layer of frost had infested the glass booth during George’s absence. ‘I found you very sympathetic,’ said Overwhite tonelessly as the tomb inscriber settled back down in the dock.

‘Sincerity city,’ said Randstable without passion.

‘I don’t think it was necessary to mention bad ideas,’ said Brat.

‘Yes, I had trouble with that part too,’ said Overwhite.

‘Abolition regimes are inherently unworkable,’ said Wengernook. ‘Seabird admitted as much.’

‘You don’t need to keep saying that,’ George snapped.

Justice Jefferson put on her whalebone glasses, briefly studied the sales contract, and asked, ‘Might I assume that the case for the defense is concluded?’

‘Our final witness will take the stand tomorrow,’ said Bonenfant.

When his advocate glowered at him, George’s bullet wound felt as if it were reopening.

Thrust into a frigid hell with nothing to sustain him but a glass painting of his unborn child, infused with the feeling that his performance on the stand had been a disaster, sick with the thought that he had betrayed his friends, George was nevertheless as happy as any human has ever been. For walking boldly through the courtroom, eyes dead ahead, was the future mother of Holly’s stepsister. His spermatids thrashed with desire. Morning smiled at him quickly, subtly; perhaps she hadn’t smiled at all. She changed the world. The palace brightened. Everyone in the gallery, even the old ones with their bleak eyes and crushed postures, had a beauty George had not noticed before.

‘Hey, look,’ said Wengernook. ‘It’s the periscope lady.’

‘Somebody that frigid should feel right at home around here,’ said Brat.

‘Why don’t you be quiet?’ hissed George.

After Morning had been sworn in, Bonenfant asked, ‘Are you a war refugee?’

She closed her eyes and said, in a voice George and his spermatids found overwhelmingly sensual, ‘I practiced psychotherapy in Chicago when it existed.’

‘Did you treat the six defendants for survivor’s guilt aboard the City of New York?’ Bonenfant asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you wish to testify?’

‘I know something that will help Paxton’s case.’

‘Something you learned while treating him?’

George grimaced internally. Nothing makes you as self-conscious, he realized – no magnitude of nakedness or public blunder – as the experience of observing others discuss you.

‘No, my testimony comes from before that time,’ said Morning. ‘Mr Bonenfant, members of the tribunal, let me take you back to the day of Paxton’s rescue. Our submarine lay in Boston Harbor, waiting for the abduction team to return. I trained one of the periscopes on the defendant’s hometown.’

‘Why?’

‘I was trying to spot my new patient.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. I became fascinated by the town itself. I realized that it was about to disappear, and I wanted to see how everyone was spending his time. The people’s faces were tight and grim. They went about their Saturday morning duties – getting their mail, buying their doughnuts – and I could find no joy. This was seven days before Christmas. But then a little girl and her mother came out of a store. The mother carried a bag of groceries. The child had a small plastic snowman in her hands. She was bubbling about it. Her lips said, “You’re going to live on our Christmas tree!” I began feeling much better… and much worse.

‘The warhead was groundburst, and the mother became trapped under a brick wall. Everything was dark. I had to use the infrared. “I’m thirsty,” the woman said. The initial radiation, of course. So the little girl ran into the burning store and came back holding a carton of orange juice. It was hard to tear open. She said – children’s lips are easy to read, they put so much into talking – she said, “Look, Mommy, I opened it! Will this make you better, Mommy?” She nursed her mother with orange juice. “Everything will be all right, Mommy,” the little girl said. The mother closed her eyes – stopped breathing. Then a man who knew the child came along. I think he worked at the bank. He seemed to be sleepwalking. “Is my mommy dead?” the girl asked. “Is my mommy in heaven now?” she wanted to know. The man fell down. The little girl began to cry. “I want my daddy,” she said. A few seconds later, another warhead arrived.

‘And then, the following month, while I was treating the defendant, he showed me his daughter’s nursery school photograph, and I realized who had given the dying woman the orange juice. The point I wish to make, your Honors, is that George Paxton is much more a victim of this war than a perpetrator. His wife and daughter were innocent civilian casualties, and he would have been one too if the prosecution hadn’t pulled his name out of a hat, entrapped him, and brought him to this ridiculous trial. Do you want revenge? Convict him. Justice? Let him go… I shall not answer any further questions, nor shall I submit to cross-examination.’

George’s sobs were slow and regular, like tympani notes at a funeral. Somebody – Brat? Wengernook? – gave his knee a firm, sympathetic squeeze.

‘Mr Aquinas, are you satisfied not to interview this witness?’ Justice Jefferson wanted to know.

‘I would like to ask her one question,’ said the chief prosecutor.

‘All right,’ said Morning. ‘One.’

Aquinas stomped on a WHEN? balloon and approached the stand. ‘As I understand your testimony, Dr Valcourt, you were on the City of New York during the whole of its seven-week passage from the United States to Antarctica. I also understand that, during this time, you engaged George Paxton in an intimate series of psychoanalytic sessions. Assuming that you do not wish to deny these facts, then my question is this – to what extent are you romantically involved with the defendant?’

The unpregnant expectant mother frowned gently and straightened up. ‘I am not now,’ she said, ‘nor have I ever been, romantically involved with the defendant.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘The tribunal will hear the closing argument of the prosecution,’ said Shawna Queen Jefferson.

Aquinas rose, approached the bench, and stood silently before the judges.

‘Fifteen billion years ago,’ he began at last, ‘the cosmos came into being. Nobody, even the best of our unadmitted scientists and clerics, quite knows how, or why.’ Looping his arms together behind his back, he paced around the pile of frozen missiles. ‘Later, some three and a half billion years ago, another miracle occurred. On one particular planet, Earth, organic molecules formed. We do not know whether the same miracle happened elsewhere. The opportunities were overwhelmingly for it, the odds overwhelmingly against it.’

‘At this rate he won’t get around to us for a week,’ said Wengernook.

‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.

‘The organisms evolved,’ said Aquinas. ‘Great apes appeared. Some of these apes were carnivorous, perhaps even cannibalistic. It is probable that the human species branched off from bipedal, small-brained, weapon-wielding primates who were stunningly proficient at murder.’

George noticed that Reverend Sparrow appeared to be suffering from apoplexy.

‘Are we innately aggressive?’ asked Aquinas. ‘Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so – and I suspect that it is – then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate – it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.’

‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ said Brat.

‘But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species – a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed – creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.’

‘Self-righteous slop, you needed that too,’ said Brat.

‘You needed a trough of it,’ said Wengernook.

‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.

‘For the past twenty days the walls of this sacred palace have enclosed a curious world,’ said Aquinas. ‘A world where peril is called security, destruction is called strategy, offense is called defense, enlightened self-interest is called appeasement, and machines of chaos and ecological horror are called weapons.’

‘And kangaroo courts are called tribunals,’ said Brat.

‘It is the world of Major General Roger Tarmac, the MARCH Hare, who believed that his Holy Triad meant salvation for America. In the name of the Bombers, and of the Subs, and of the Land-Based Missiles – Amen! It is the world of Brian Overwhite, the weapons industry’s favorite arms controller, who never in his entire career denied the Pentagon a system it really wanted. It is the world of William Randstable, the doomsday doctor, whose smart warhead was just one more bullet in the revolver with which humanity played, you should forgive the expression, Russian roulette. It is the world of Peter Sparrow, the Ezekiel of the airwaves, who wanted America to demonstrate her moral superiority over her adversary by becoming just like her adversary, adopting the economy and mentality of a garrison state. It is the world of Robert Wengernook, the auditor of acceptable losses, who forgot that a species as inquisitive as Homo sapiens cannot draw up plans for a war, even a war of extinction, without eventually needing to find out how well they work. And it is the world of George Paxton, citizen, perhaps the most guilty of all. Every night, this man went to bed knowing that the human race was pointing nuclear weapons at itself. Every morning, he woke up knowing that the weapons were still there. And yet he never took a single step to relieve the threat.’

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.’

Aquinas leaped up. ‘Your Honors, how much longer must we endure this ludicrous presentation?’

Justice Jefferson seesawed her glasses on the bridge of her nose, looked at Document 318, and said, ‘Your findings are most unusual, Mr Bonenfant, and the court considers them admissible, but what is the point?’

‘Just this. Armed deterrence did not fail. The war happened through a freak of nature. If the teratorns had taken a slightly different flight path on that particular Saturday morning, they would have eluded the NORAD early warning systems, as they had done so many times in the past, and the nuclear balance would have remained intact. My clients planned no crimes against peace, nor did they carry them out. Armed deterrence worked, your Honors. It worked.’

‘It worked,’ said Brat.

‘It worked,’ said Wengernook.

‘It worked,’ said Overwhite.

‘It worked,’ said Randstable.

‘Amen,’ said Reverend Sparrow.

‘And that is all I have to say,’ Bonenfant concluded.

Justice Jefferson cast a thoughtful glance toward the foulsmelling bird – a glance into which George read vast volumes of wisdom and compassion – and announced that the court would withdraw to write its verdict.

And so the ice continent became a kind of physician’s office, humanity’s final remnant fidgeting in the anteroom, waiting to learn whether its collective case was terminal.

In George’s brain vicious and sadistic memory cells played his testimony over and over, torturing the guilt areas with snatches from speeches he might have made. Should I have spoken of Justine – of how she instinctively knew the suits were no good? Said more about Holly? Mentioned the Giant Ride horse, the Big Dipper, or the Mary Merlin doll back home in the closet? Certainly I could have put more stress on my co-defendants’ positive points…

He paced his cell, wearing a groove in the ice.

Why doesn’t your future wife come to visit you? his spermatids asked.

If word got back to the judges, he explained, they’d know she cared about me.

Of course, said the spermatids. Yes. Naturally. Why doesn’t she come anyway?

I don’t know, he confessed.

On the witness stand, she said she didn’t love you.

That was just to help our case.

JUSTICES STILL DELIBERATING, the slopes of Mount Christchurch declared to the assembled legions.

‘This game is seven-card stud,’ said Overwhite.

‘They’re probably hung up on Paxton’s testimony,’ said Brat. ‘All that talk about bad ideas – it must have thrown them.’

‘For a loop,’ said Wengernook.

‘I told the truth,’ said George.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Overwhite. He squeezed George’s hand. ‘I’m sorry you had to hear that stuff about your kid.’

‘It’s all right,’ said George. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he added.

‘War always has its human side,’ said Brat.

‘Do you suppose Jefferson and company were favorably impressed by that vulture?’ asked Overwhite.

‘Definitely,’ said Wengernook.

‘An excellent move by Bonenfant,’ said Randstable. ‘Very pretty.’

‘It proves that you don’t get into a war by being too strong,’ said Brat.

‘Ace bets,’ said Randstable.

‘One egg,’ said Wengernook.

‘Two,’ said Overwhite.

‘We should be glad,’ said Brat. ‘It’s a good sign when a jury is out for a long time.’

‘That’s just in the movies,’ said Wengernook.

‘There is no jury,’ said Overwhite.

‘There are no movies,’ said George.

‘Raise,’ said Brat.

JUSTICES TO ANNOUNCE VERDICT TODAY, said Mount Christ-church.

The final week of school, the final day of a summer by the sea, the final hour of a long train trip – George could recall all of these experiences. In each case the space in question had changed, abandoning him even as he attempted to abandon it. For nearly a month the Ice Palace of Justice had been his home, but now it was regaining the aloofness and unfamiliarity it had worn on the first day.

The judges entered slowly, their black robes soaking up the oily gloom, each wearing a face that could have bluffed its way through a thousand losing poker hands. Shawna Queen Jefferson, who carried a ream of paper and a biography of Abraham Lincoln in her arms, was mumbling to herself. Theresa Gioberti seemed worried, Jan Wojciechowski bemused, Kamo Yoshinobu sad.

They sat down.

The cold, muffled stillness of a planetarium seeped through the palace. George scanned the gallery – the faces, the signs. Yes, there she was, between LET US IN and GIVE THEM A VOICE: Aubrey’s mother. His spermatids longed for the South Pole and the strength they knew they would find there.

At the defense table Bonenfant, Dennie, and Parkman held hands.

Justice Jefferson took her whalebone glasses from her scopas suit and put them on. She spread out the papers, selected one.

‘I shall begin by stating that, in the opinion of the tribunal, the doctrine of armed deterrence remains vigorous, credible, and intact.’

A vast and spontaneous ‘NO!’ thundered down from the gallery. The judge smashed her gavel into the bench, launching a spray of ice chips.

‘Even while undergoing certain disturbing variations during the last administration, the armed-deterrence doctrine continued to boast such resilience that it could be used to make as good a case for expanding America’s thermonuclear arsenal as for scaling it down.’

A smile jumped onto Dennie’s impossibly pretty face.

‘Hot damn!’ said Wengernook.

‘Guys, we brought it off,’ said Brat.

‘All they wanted was an explanation,’ said Overwhite.

‘We agree with Mr Bonenfant that armed deterrence might have lasted until the nuclear powers grew tired of maintaining their pointless stockpiles, subsequently scrapping them,’ said Shawna Queen Jefferson. ‘And we agree with the defendant Randstable that the warheads might also have disappeared through a kind of technological evolution.’

When the groans and catcalls finally subsided, the judge continued.

‘In his closing argument the chief counsel put a crucial question to us. What would we have done in his clients’ place? A fair question. A tormenting question…

‘Oddly enough, Mr Aquinas miscalculated when he introduced his scale-model weapons as evidence for the prosecution. For we learned that, whether carved from ice or from metal, such technology has a fearsome glamor. We found ourselves saying, “Yes, yes, give us these sensual missiles, these steel boats, these wondrous planes, these high-IQ warheads. Give us these things, and no one will ever dare to attack us.” So we too would have wanted that Triad, in all its completeness and power.’

Randstable and Wengernook exchanged thumbs-up signals. Transcending their differences over STABLE II, Overwhite and Sparrow embraced. Brat offered his bony right hand to George; the tomb inscriber shook it.

And then, after taking a drink of cocoa, Shawna Queen Jefferson removed her glasses and slammed them klack against the bench. ‘It is not we four judges who are on trial here, however,’ she said swiftly, tersely. ‘It is you six defendants,’ she added. ‘Thank God,’ sighed the president of the court.

She opened her Lincoln biography and, moistening her black thumb with a pink tongue, flipped back several pages. ‘In a message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves…”’ She slammed the book shut. ‘Gentlemen in the dock, you know as well as I that the vast record assembled in this courtroom admits of but one interpretation. It is true that your crimes had the outward appearance of legality. It is true that you committed them under conditions that made it difficult for you to feel you were doing wrong. It is even true that you tried to limit their essentially illimitable implications.

‘But you did not rise with the occasion. You did not think anew. You did not disenthral yourselves… And you failed to reckon on the vulture.

‘There will always be a vulture, gentlemen. History is full of vultures. When you booby-trap an entire planet, you cannot cry “Non mea culpa!” if some faulty computer chip, misfiled war game, nuclear terrorist, would-be Napoleon, unmanageable crisis, or incomprehensible event pulls the tripwire. You cannot say that you were simply obeying your constituents or leaders. To quote Hannah Arendt, “Politics is not like the nursery. In politics, obedience and support are the same.”’

Bonenfant was shivering as if his scopas suit had ceased to function. Dennie’s exquisite face had turned ugly with anger and frustration.

‘Support,’ repeated Justice Jefferson. ‘There is where your guilt lies. For when all is said and done, what remains is this. Each of you in his own way encouraged his government to cultivate a technology of mass murder, and, by extension, each of you supported a policy of mass murder.’

George looked at Morning and realized that he had never before seen anyone weeping at a distance. He felt his spermatids shaking with dread.

‘Speaking personally,’ Justice Jefferson continued, ‘I would like nothing better than to say, “Gentlemen, there has been enough slaughter already, and we have decided to answer your crimes with love. You are free to leave this courtroom and survive as best you can here in Antarctica.”’ She bent her head for a moment. When she looked up, tears were poised on her eyelids. ‘But I cannot say that, for the tribunal’s duty at this moment is to tell all creation that we loathe what you did, and we know only one way to accomplish this.’

Parkman left the defense table and, throwing up his hands in a gesture of contempt, stalked out of the courtroom.

‘The defendant Overwhite will please rise,’ said Justice Wojciechowski. ‘Mr Brian Overwhite, the court finds you guilty on all four counts and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’

‘I thought you just wanted an explanation,’ Overwhite sputtered.

‘The defendant Randstable will please rise,’ said Justice Yoshinobu. ‘Dr William Randstable, the court finds you guilty on all four counts and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’

‘If I may say so, your Honors, that is the poorest decision I have ever heard,’ responded the former whiz kid.

‘The defendant Sparrow will please rise,’ said Justice Gioberti. ‘Reverend Peter Sparrow, the court finds you guilty on all four counts and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’

The evangelist pulled the little Bible from his three-piece suit and kissed it. ‘I am with you always,’ he said with great dignity, ‘even unto the end of the world.’

‘The defendant Tarmac will please rise,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘There’s a pattern developing here,’ muttered the MARCH Hare.

‘Major General Roger Tarmac, the court finds you guilty on all four counts and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’ Brat pantomimed his opinion that Justice Wojciechowski should be subjected to an involuntary and unpleasant sexual experience.

‘The defendant Wengernook will please rise,’ said Justice Yoshinobu.

The assistant defense secretary did not move. His eyes looked packed in wax. His hands vibrated like chilly tarantulas. Gila Guizot entered the glass booth and hauled him to his feet.

‘Mr Robert Wengernook, the court finds you guilty on all four counts and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’

Gila repositioned the defendant in his chair.

Brat is right, thought George. A pattern is developing here. But not for me. My luck is too good. Cancer? Nah, it’s only scar tissue, the family doctor had said. Yes, ‘I’ll marry you, Justine had said. Sure, I’ll give you a job, Arthur Crippen had said.

‘The defendant Paxton will please rise,’ said Justice Jefferson.

I’m a survivor, he thought. Nuclear war, radiation poisoning, human extinction – nothing can touch me.

George felt himself rising. He realized that he was standing, that Morning was studying him with moist eyes.

It’s positive, George! The pregnancy test was positive!

‘Mr George Paxton, the court finds you…’

Nothing to worry about, folks, every baby gets ear infections.

‘Innocent—’

Innocent!

‘…on Count One, Crimes Against Peace. Innocent on Count Two, War Crimes. Innocent on Count Three, Crimes Against Humanity.’

Aubrey, Morning, we’ve done it!

‘On Count Four, Crimes Against the Future, the court finds you guilty as charged and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’ Justice Jefferson winced violently. ‘I am sorry, Mr Paxton. We rather liked you.’ Her gavel hit the bench for the last time. ‘The International Military and Civilian Tribunal is hereby dissolved.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Even if George had heard the aphorism that nothing concentrates one’s mind so wonderfully as knowing one will be hanged at dawn, his mind would still have been woefully unconcentrated. A tribunal stenographer transcribing his thoughts would have produced only babblings, yipes, and the same chant he had improvised when the warhead was groundburst upon his home town. This cannot be happening, this cannot be happening, this cannot…

Like a cancer victim scanning a medical dictionary in hopes that the standard definitions have been repealed overnight in favor of good news, George reviewed what Justice Jefferson had said to him, seeking to find alternative meanings for ‘guilty’ and ‘hanged’ and ‘sunrise’ and ‘tomorrow.’ Futile. He picked up his Leonardo. His tears hit the paint, turning Aubrey’s dress to mud. I must face all this with dignity, he recited to himself. But where was the audience? In what history book would his courage be recorded? He returned the glass slide to the nightstand.

A discordant jangle of keys reached his ears, and then the door cracked open, sending a burst of torchlight across the cell floor.

‘Morning?’

But it was only Juan Ramos, bearing a large, hourglass-shaped object and a plate of food. ‘Your last meal, brave extinctionist. Also, if you want it, an ice clock.’

George’s last meal was a sumptuous pile of fried skua, boiled sea lion, and corn, the latter harvested ‘from the ice-free valleys near McMurdo Sound,’ as Ramos explained. There was even a small glass of wine – ‘fermented penguin lymph’ – and a fresh orange.

‘I would like some privacy,’ said George.

‘My fear is the utensils, Señor.’ Ramos set the ice clock next to Aubrey’s portrait. ‘You might try killing yourself, no?’

The profundity of George’s appetite embarrassed and confused him. Didn’t his body know what was going on here? He devoured every morsel, scraping the plate with his knife, licking the blade. His wine vanished in three gulps.

Ramos said, ‘The clock will tell you when dawn arrives. As we say, “It’s always darkest before the dawn in Antarctica, and it’s always darkest after that too.”’ He demonstrated the device. At the base, a small seal-oil lamp. In the top chamber, a block of ice. As the heat rose, the ice dissolved drop by drop into the lower chamber, which already contained a puddle.

‘The design comes from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks,’ the jailor explained. ‘Buenos noches,’ he added softly. He collected the utensils and left.

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.

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.

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.

Grabbing successive fistfuls of feathers and pulling himself upward, he ascended the vulture’s left wing. The bird stank. It regarded him with an eye resembling a volcanic cinder. He straddled its scrawny neck, threw his arms around Morning’s waist.

‘There was blood on the ceiling,’ he said.

‘A dead seal, so our friend would cut through the roof. The feeding frenzy, right? Hold tight!’

The door flew open, mashing into the cell wall. George looked down. The guard held a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other. A scar ran like a black wadi all the way from his forehead to his mouth, which at the moment gaped in astonishment.

The vulture beat its wings, and the fugitives rose toward the lightless dawn.

Guards scurried across the courtyard, their lanterns and torches darting about like crazed fireflies. Gun metal flashed. Rifleshots ripped through the dark, shattering the teratorn’s tail, so that great severed feathers drifted toward the ground. A slug drilled through George’s boot heel, another clipped the fur on his parka. The vulture screeched, shook, but stayed aloft. The volley was answered by dozens of shadowy, armed protestors streaming through the gate. FREE PAXTON, their banners said. NO SYMBOLIC EXECUTIONS. The protestors cheered as the fugitives ascended beyond the skirmish. Shots, bright bullets – bodies hit the ice, black blood erupting from their scopas suits, their screams mingling with the vulture’s cries. Oh, valuable bird, thought George, carnivorous angel, braver than an eagle, more perfect than a horse, Leonardo need not have feared you. With a great heave of its rudderless body, the teratorn cleared the Ice Palace ramparts. Soaring over a tower, it stretched its legs, opened its talons, and turned the Antarctic national flag into a dozen fluttering ribbons.

She’s made good on her scheme, Captain Sverre concluded when Juan Ramos failed to return to the white Cat. He smiled, pleased that his final voyage had not been made in the service of the McMurdo Agreement’s framers and their show trial. Pivoting the periscope, he watched a search party swarm across the Nimrod Glacier; their lanterns bobbed among the hummocks like wills-o’-the-wisp. He looked toward the plateau, focused on a black and menacing shape cutting across the southern constellations. A Soviet Spitball cruise missile? No – a teratorn. For unto them a species will be born. Fly, George. Fly, Morning…

‘Fly, Teratornis!’ George screamed.

Although he had ample cause to feel that his escape was a mirage, the wish-dream of a man confronting doom, the plausible discomforts of the flight told George that all was real. Bird riding was far less romantic than he would have guessed. Teratorns, it seemed, were flying ecosystems, their feathers clogged with parasites – worms, bugs – and the parasites of parasites. The wind lashed George’s face; it bored under his skin and made icy tunnels in his bones. The bird’s cervical vertebrae defied the padding of his suit, cutting into his thighs. The oozy odor of vulture sweat, death left in the sun, blew into his nostrils. Yes, this was truly happening.

‘Where are we going?’ he called above the hysterical wind, certain that at any moment he was going to fall off.

‘Across the Pole – to the boat!’ Morning called back.

The Pole! His gonads buzzed. In one of his seminiferous tubules, an Aubrey Paxton spermatid lay waiting to be steered into its appropriate duct. He could feel it.

‘The boat?’

‘She’s been at sea! Sverre brought her back into the Pacific, round the Getz Shelf and—’

Her words were claimed by the gale.

They were free! They could take the submarine, sail it into the timefolds, find places where flowers bloomed and rolling hills again wore lush mantles of grass. Free… Inevitably, inexorably, the psychic museum flashed through George’s brain. He saw Morning at the moment of giving birth, saw the infant’s soggy cord, its unexpectedly bountiful hair, its little hand, an arabesque of wrinkles.

Morning pounded on the vulture’s neck. It swung its beak away from the Endurance Cliffs and toward the crest of the glacier, beyond which lay the Queen Alexandra Mountain Range and, further still, the massive polar plateau, land of ten thousand ice limbos, uncountable hummocks, and that sad, forsaken point from which the traveler has nowhere to go but north.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

By nightfall the fugitives were at the Pole, a stretch of open plateau seamed against the dark sky and heaving with waves of frozen snow. Vents and antennas poked through the sasgruti, evidence of the submerged outpost known as New Amundsen-Scott Station. They hitched their teratorn to a chimney.

Someone had left a mirror ball – the type intended to decorate a garden – at the precise endpoint of the earth’s axis. George pressed it to his stomach. Was this how a pregnancy felt?

‘I shall regain my fertility here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got millions of spermatids now, but unless they are pulled into my epididymis, they will never mature.’

Morning’s shrug, her frown, the cant of her eyebrows – yes, there was certainly some skepticism in these gestures, but mainly, he felt, she was expressing curiosity. She wished him luck. Good, he thought, she’s keeping an open mind. We have no idea what wisdom the future would have brought, what breakthroughs in mushroom therapy and geomagnetic cures.

He hugged the mirror ball tighter. His lower body trembled. Am I committing the great Unitarian sin of self-delusion? No, something was definitely occurring in his gonads, a grand-scale spermatid migration. Tendrils of light rose from the ice, forming tiny diamond-like satellites that went into orbit around the mirror ball, a thousand sparkling moons following their own reflections. He sensed his spermatids’ happiness, the joy of children being chased by an incoming tide. Onward the seedlets marched, driven by the resilient, magnetic earth. They reached the epididymis. Here they would mature, learn to whip their fine, new tails. In time, as he recalled from the biology text he had read on the sub, they would be diluted by the great fluids of the seminal vesicles – what a technician God was! – then move on to new and exciting vistas: vas deferens, urethra, vagina, cervix, ovarian duct, uterine wall. While only one of his nascent spermatozoa was destined to sire his child, the others would do their part, bumping against the ovum with their protein-degrading enzymes – knock-knock-knock-knock – thus removing the troublesome outer layers.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Aubrey Paxton.

The little moons stopped in their orbits, ceased to exist, and he set the mirror ball back on the ice.

Morning had shot two skuas with the assault rifle from her scopas suit. One corpse protruded from her backpack. The other lay across the Teratornis’s beak, and then – snap, gulp – the meal was gone, not dead long enough to suit the vulture, perhaps, but it made no complaint.

‘I believe I’m cured,’ George said. Spermatids were frolicking in his epididymis, home free.

‘You are a man of formidable ambition,’ Morning replied.

They followed the spray of her flashlight down a sloping wooden ramp and into the heart of the station. Tunnels branched left and right from the central bore, thirty-foot trenches roofed by arching sections of corrugated steel. Turning, they found themselves amid a congestion of radio equipment and meteorological instruments. Here they plucked the skua and cooked it on the primus stove from her suit. It was gone in two minutes. Weary, numb, they pushed their cold lips together, kissed without feeling it, engaged in a bulky Antarctic hug. They slept.

Dawn came, dark, dismal.

‘I have hope,’ he said.

‘Lazarev is fourteen hundred miles away,’ she replied.

‘Hope for our family.’

Morning fired up the primus stove and began preparing coffee.

‘Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine bringing the whole human species back,’ he said. ‘All that intermarriage – it gets messy, the genes degenerate or something. Still,’ he smiled, ‘Adam and Eve brought it off.’

‘I thought you were a Unitarian.’

‘All right, maybe it will be the last family – but it will be. Life is not nothing. Sverre can show us how to run the boat. We’ll take her out of here, away from all this ice and justice. We’ll get to someplace warm.’

Morning poured coffee into her expressionless mouth. She harvested ice flecks from her hair.

‘I’d like to know what you think,’ he said.

‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘No.’

She placed her chilled hands over the primus flame, moved them as if they were on a spit. ‘I think…’

‘Yes?’

His fianceé was at the most precise and unambiguous place on earth, yet she looked lost. ‘I think that we must get to Lazarev before we get to the Garden of Eden.’

‘Yes, but after Lazarev, we can try to become pregnant, and then—’

‘Men don’t want children, George, men want strategic options. Didn’t you lean anything at the trial?’

‘I want children. A child. Our child.’

‘You want Justine and Holly back.’

‘I want you and—’

Morning hurled a fistful of skua bones against the hard snow wall, slicing off his sentence. ‘Can’t you figure anything out on your own? Must it all be explained to you? In two days we’ll be flying over Skeidshoven Mountain. Do you know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, idiot?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do.’

I do not know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, he told himself, over and over. His bullet wound had not hurt so much since its inception. I do not know…

He knew. Oh, God, he knew. Damn you, Nostradamus, prince of frauds! And damn you as well, Leonardo, painter of lies!

He pulled the magic lantern slide from his breast pocket. His supposed wife smiled up at him, his alleged daughter still wore a merry face. With a quick slapping motion he rammed the glass rectangle against the floor. There was a sound like a nut encountering a nutcracker. It’s not everyone who gets to destroy a priceless Leonardo, he thought. And then his tears started, large and cold, as if an ice clock were ticking in his brain.

Morning removed her gloves and picked up a Leonardo sliver. It contained Aubrey’s head.

‘What is Skeidshoven Mountain?’ George asked. He knew.

She rested the sliver against her palm. ‘It’s where I…’

‘Yes?’

‘Gained the continent.’

She drew the glass across her flesh. Black blood rushed out. Clotting, it acquired the tormented contours and pinched skin of a weeping face.

‘On the second of May,’ she said, ‘a bright winter afternoon. I beheld my memories, and I had nothing. No children, no lovers, just a working knowlege of psychotherapy.’

Squeezing her eyelids together, she bottled up her tears.

Even with the frequent pauses for gulps and sighs, her story did not take long. Stowing away as the submarine left McMurdo Station… pretending to come aboard with Randstable… going to Sverre and convincing him that his prisoners were threatened with sudden mental collapse…

‘I wanted a life, George, not the dead dreams of those wretches in the limbos.’ Her tears escaped, hardening into thin bright glaciers before they could leave her face. ‘And I did it. I brought it off. You would never have loved a darkblood, but you loved me.’

She opened her eyes. He was gone…

I don’t understand the first thing about admitteds, Morning thought. I love this man, and I have no idea what matters to him.

She ran through the maze of ice-and-steel tunnels, following the flashlight beam, chasing his crackling footfalls and the shouts that rattled off the frozen surfaces of New Amundsen-Scott Station – howls of unfathomable sadness, curses targeted against God, and, most of all, over and over, a thousand echoing demands that the universe give him a child.

The sickness began in his spleen. Sverre could feel it corrupting the fat organ, rushing outward, pouring into his lymph, pressing toward the headwaters of his heart. He lay in his bunk for hours, days, powerless to stop the progress of his unadmittance, his mind wandering the foggy border between sleep and oblivion. His brain floated on dark, tarry fluids. Occasionally it showed him snatches of his beloved Kristin, more often an Antarctic crevasse, an ice tunnel to hell.

It was all in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. Sverre had been the first of his race to gain the continent, and so he would be the first to lose it. Ragnarok, he thought. World’s End. He was satisfied with his new verse. It did not rhyme; poetry need not rhyme. Yea, Thor struck Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent as it shot from the sea, and the worm’s last breath did blast the god and dry his blood, and next the mortal world itself did crack, locked in endless winter. Ragnarok – when all debts fall due, all legends climax. And so, pursuant to the legend, an Antarctic storm rushed through the boat, sea dragon’s breath prying back the hatches, whooshing down the corridors, crossing Sverre’s cabin. He drew his blankets tight, but the dragon’s breath still came; it squeezed his bones and turned his gutta-percha eye into a hailstone. His ears throbbed with the detonations of Jormungandr’s heart.

He awoke. The heart was a human fist, pounding at his cabin door.

Rolling out of bed, he was hit by the smell of himself, flesh marinated in alcohol and sweat. Gin, he knew, and gin alone, would get him to the door. He limped to his writing desk, found the bottle, shoved its mouth home. His intoxicated hand staggered across the desk, knocking over the ink pot, scattering pages of the Saga of Thor.

Behind the door two ghosts in scopas suits waited. They were rimmed with frost. One had an ice storm raging in its beard.

‘You’re out of uniform,’ Morning said, removing her helmet.

‘Dr Valcourt?’ He took a pull at the bottle.

‘From the Pole to Astrid Land by vulture in fifty-one hours,’ she said. ‘That must be a record, right? They’ll put us in National Geographic.’

‘Morning and I are in love,’ said George.

‘I know,’ said the captain.

Sverre walked forward, tripped. George bear-hugged him, and the gin bottle clattered to the floor. It was shocking how insubstantial the captain had become, his skin like paper, his beard the color and consistency of dead seaweed. The fugitives carried him to the bed, lowered him into the Sverre-shaped mold in his mattress. He asked for his poem and some gin. While Morning gathered up the papers from the writing desk, George retrieved the bottle.

‘I saw the executions,’ Sverre said. ‘Tarmac refused the hood. A real four-ball general…’ He coughed. ‘I would like to hear the Saga of Thor.’

Morning read the captain his poem.

‘That’s not bad, is it?’ said Sverre.

‘You would have been one heck of an epitaph writer,’ answered George.

‘Be honest now – is it any good?’

‘In your time you became a poet,’ Morning replied.

George lifted the white raven from Sverre’s writing desk, smoothed its alabaster feathers. Holly would have named it Birdie. ‘Sir, you’ve made certain efforts on my behalf,’ he said stiffly, ‘and I appreciate them.’

‘Your name should never have been in the indictment, Paxton.’ Sverre grinned, showing teeth that resembled Indian corn. ‘Be fruitful and multiply – both of you.’

Morning fired an unambiguous glance toward George: leave him his illusions. ‘My dear Lieutenant Commander Sverre,’ she said, ‘may I assume that you never mustered yourself out of the Navy? Are you still captain of the City of New York?’

The dying man could not stand, and so he sat on the altar, boots dangling against the silk antependium. At one time his voice could have filled the whole chapel, rocking it as would a hellfire sermon from Reverend Sparrow, but now the engaged couple had to lean forward to catch his words.

‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of… whatever.’ A cough attacked, spinning him around. He flailed at the air, smacked his hand against a candlestick, sent it toppling. ‘Something, something. To join together this man and this woman in… something. Holy matrimony. Consecrated fornication. Something.’

He took the gin bottle from his coat and drank.

‘Do you, Morning Valcourt, take this man to be your lawfully wedded wife… husband… to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse… something… for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish… all that… till death do you part?’

‘I do.’

He coughed, and black blood came up.

‘And do you, George Paxton, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, come locusts… gammas rays… come… never mind. Do you?’

‘I do.’

‘Forasmuch as you have consented together in wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and the captain of this ship, I now pronounce you husband and wife.’

Husband and wife kissed. Their scopas suits came together, separating a few seconds later with a loud, rubbery skluck.

When Sverre smiled, black blood spilled over his teeth. ‘Tell your children to respect the Navy.’ He collapsed on the altar, muttered, ‘Look – she’s never been clearer. Look at Kristin, would you, flying up and down on that roller coaster, up and down, so… clear…’

They laid him out, opened his claw-hammer coat. Like an abused onion Sverre lost his layers, skin, muscle, viscera, veins, nerves, all sloughing from his bones, and then there was dust, and then there was nothing, nothing at all save a solitary gutta-percha eye.

The newlyweds gathered Sverre’s vacant coat into a bundle, brought it on deck, tossed it over the side. An ice floe slapped against the coat, pounding it into the depths of the bay. A flock of penguins watched from their rookeries. Dressed in their finest tuxedos, they had come for a wedding, only to find it superseded by a funeral. They stood dutifully on the cliffs, solemn as professional mourners, until the vulture came and, with fearsome squawks and a tumultuous beating of its wings, chased them away. It was the last George ever saw of the great unextinct beast, his feathered co-defendant, freak, fluke, ender of the world. Exhausted, famished – they had not known deep sleep or a true meal in two days – husband and wife returned to their bower. They went to the galley, a wonderland of kettles, and prepared their wedding feast, eating it on the spot. Apples and pears disappeared into ravenous mouths. Turkey drumsticks were consumed half raw. Corn went down frozen. They devoured their wedding cake in batter form.

Staggering into the corridor, the happy couple realized that they were over a hundred yards from any cabin. They looked at each other. A hundred yards, a hundred miles – no difference. They dropped to the floor and nuzzled. Like a lizard abandoning its skin, George slipped out of his scopas suit. He heard a grinding noise – snores, yes, but these were the snores of Morning Valcourt, hence, pleasing snores, subtle, intelligent. Quietly he studied his new wife, this great unadmitted psychotherapist, this brilliant vulture pilot, gleaning endless delight from her freckled, ice-scarred, beautiful, sleeping face…

When he awoke, the world had become an erotic film, the rug soft, the corridor warm, sweat accumulating inside his underwear like sweet balm, and there she was, freshly showered and dressed in silk pajamas emblazoned with the anchor insignia of the United States Navy, displaying herself in a provocative low-angle shot, offering a wet hand. He jumped to his feet and followed her down the corridor, glorying in the fragrance of her soggy hair, his erection moving before him like a bowsprit. He shivered with the hair-trigger sexuality of adolescence. Outside the executive officer’s cabin she kissed him with awkward desire.

‘I’m sweaty,’ he said.

‘I don’t care,’ she replied, leading him over the threshold.

The cabin was ablaze. How many candles? A hundred? A thousand? Candles lovingly arranged on the nightstand, the bureau, the floor, candles stuck in gin bottles and teacups, candles lined up along the headboard like the Constellation Midgard Serpent.

‘Are we having a séance?’ he asked.

She gasped and lost her smile. George bit his lower lip mercilessly, wincing at the pain.

‘I’m sorry. I—’

‘I thought you would like them,’ she said. Her eyes grew moist. ‘They’re supposed to be… romantic.’

‘I like them,’ he said hastily. ‘They’re fine.’

‘Look, George, I simply don’t know about these things.’

‘They’re very romantic.’

‘I’ve never done this before,’ she said.

‘Follow my lead.’

He placed his arms around her, massaged her shoulder blades. She did the same to him. He undid her top, working the wonderfully pliant buttons, tossed it onto the bed, the only place in the room where it would not catch fire. She mimicked him; his undershirt flew away. Though not large, her breasts still partook unmistakably of that inscrutable genre of sensuality, that religion of round altars, source of obsessions so intense that the males of his extinct species had been mystified and powerless, the females mystified and annoyed, and so he gawked, feeling that he owed the indulgence not only to himself but also to his dead gender, and then he kissed her nipples, which pushed out like brown shoots from soil, and within seconds she had picked up the cue and was kissing his.

He finished unclothing her. She reciprocated. They stood together in the flaming room.

‘You see, I have to put this in you.’ Ready to burst, he lowered her onto the bed.

‘So I’ve read.’ She laughed. ‘Do I put something in you? I forget.’

He entered her, sawed, released his eager sperm. He withdrew instantly.

‘Was that it?’ she asked.

‘The first time you drank coffee – you were probably nine or something – you didn’t like it, right?’

‘I was never nine.’

He pivoted, put his legs over the bed. A candle flame nipped at his ankle. ‘What we really need, I think’ – he stood up – ‘is for me to wash.’

He went to the adjoining shower, feeling like a general who had lost a battle but still retained high hopes for the war. Morning followed faithfully. They bathed each other, kissed wetly. She was so solid, so gloriously bone-filled – not at all what he expected of her race. He had heard of the psychology experiment in which a male rat is kept endlessly potent through a steady supply of new mates, and when he saw how the water changed her, rolling in glittery pebbles down her impossibly desirable sides, and then, a few moments later, when he saw how the sheets gathered around her thighs changed her yet again, he knew that he had found in Morning Valcourt an infinite source of arousal.

This time it was a screw of which both their sexes would have been proud. She began to grasp the crux of the matter, liquifying, trembling, reveling in the unfamiliar feelings. Memories of her canceled love life flooded back. He touched her with the same appreciative passion he had brought to creviced granite. Her orgasm was florid and long, driving him to analogous spasms. They napped, awoke, met again amid the little flames, Morning improvising now, initiating novelties, using her leased body to deny her unadmittance, and he realized that, when all was said and done, she had a greater aptitude for this than he. His pleasure was fuller than he had ever known it. Around the clock they subsisted on sex – napping, eating, breathing for its sake. They discovered uncharted orifices, claimed them; they invented lewd jokes, some verbal, some enacted with fingers and mouths; they drank each other, rutted, tried to make it dirty, then cosmic, so that on some occasions they fucked, on others they made love, ever mindful of the potential in new locations – the gaming tables, the chapel, the swimming pools, the main mess hall, her office. She got her period. They screwed on sheets soaked with black blood. His cock darkened. Their mutual maneuvers, their thrusts and archings, became gestures of defiance, acts that mocked the bad ideas, and as George’s seeds lashed their excellent tails and struggled through Morning’s eggless womb, the couple found themselves mentally cheering, thinking: try anyway, you wretched little bastards, be fruitful and multiply, for unto us a child will be born, you can do it, try.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

April is the crudest month, never stopping, intent on causing May. George’s wife grew weak. A cough raged through her. The warm, ebony blood drained from her face, leaving it chalky and dry. Her hair became brittle. Odd noises rose from deep within her, wheezes and scrapings, sounds like burning cellophane.

Sometimes George would find her in the periscope room, hugging one of the machines, pressing it into the shank of her body until her vibrations stopped. She began staying in bed all day, breathing soggily, spitting up ink.

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘My life.’

‘Won’t that make you sad?’ Slipping a second pillow under her heavy head, he could not help but notice the stale vapors coming from her mouth.

‘Yes.’ Black veins pulsed in her eyes.

He kissed his wife. ‘Let’s talk.’

‘Leaves keep occurring to me, autumn leaves, every type, red, yellow. I think I spent some time in Vermont. I would have liked primitive art – this is quite clear – and going into libraries and reading the book spines, so many of them, famous and obscure all jumbled together. Also, I never outgrew stuffed animals.’

Dispassionately she recalled her parents, murdered in their preschool years during the Battle of Corpus Christi. Helen would have been a bowling alley attendant, a cold woman, unhappy, mired in quasi-poverty and a pathological marriage. Hugh would have been a mechanic and also a self-pitying lout who wanted a son, someone he could shoot things with.

Happier thoughts now. Morning, the thoughtful, gushy school-girl, writing meaningful poems about dead birds, creating a craw-daddy farm in Parson’s Creek, scholarships piling up, the Jacob Bronowski Award for the Junior Displaying the Most Interest in Science, and other prizes with equally peculiar names, and they were hers – hers! – Hugh couldn’t take them away. She flourished in graduate school, taking the clinical psychology department by storm, then converted her Ph.D. into a lucrative practice. Guilt was her speciality.

She told George of her cases – wins, draws, losses. Phillip Cassidy, inhabited till death by seven personalities. Marcie Cremo, debrained by her own revolver. And the triumphs? asked George. Quite a few, answered Morning. (The trick, you see, was to be their friend, though they didn’t teach that at the University of Chicago.) Janet Hodges, fat and self-hating, but when they were finished she was a Rubens model, sensually plump, able to have unhappy love affairs just like anyone else. Willie Howard, age six, who didn’t talk, not a word, was thought to be brain-damaged, but then Morning got out the puppet with the three eyes, and it taught Willie how to speak Neptunian, and so Willie taught it English.

And now – memory bending back on itself, shards from youth, sacred frivolities: a stuffed octopus, a red bicycle, a stocky ceramic teapot, a clock that looked like a cat, the smell of rain, the caffeine air of fall. My best friend was named Sylvia, I think. I loved major league baseball. Yes, I would have been a fan, can you believe that? I got my first period at a Houston Astros game. I bled for the Astros, red blood.

She described Astros who had never lived. 2003, that was to be their year. Last game of the World Series. Ninth inning. Down a run. Cristobal walks… Robin Arcadia comes up and… bang!

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You’ve had quite a life,’ he said.

‘Bet your ass.’

He lay down beside her, shivering from the coldness she gave off and from the thought of what it meant. Sleep came instantly. His dream took him to a moss-muffled forest, all the great women there, Justine, Morning, his mother (SHE WAS BETTER THAN SHE KNEW), the four of them building a house (a cottage actually, on stilts above a lake), and then the children appeared, Holly, Aubrey, and a third child that Justine had gone off and had during the war, a boy.

Waking, he realized that his eyelids were stuck together, and he feared that when he pulled them apart another pair would be lying beneath them, and beyond that, another. My wife is dying. There is nothing I can do. He heard the pops of the little muscles as he opened his eyes. The ceiling lights glowered at him. He turned over, saw the vacant depression in the mattress, and all the ice in Antarctica entered his heart.

But then she limped into the cabin, feverish, shaking. Snow filled the creases of her scopas suit. Scrolls of ice hung from what remained of her hair.

‘You frightened me,’ he said. ‘I thought—’

‘No. The second of May. I gained the continent on the second of May.’

‘You’ve been outside? It’s crazy for you to go outside.’

‘I made a deal.’

‘What?’

‘Hug me.’

He did.

‘I’m going to say something strange,’ she rasped. ‘No matter what it is, you won’t stop hugging me.’

‘I promise,’ he said.

‘You’re going to see your daughter again. Holly.’

He hugged her more tightly. ‘Holly is dead.’

‘I made a deal,’ she said. ‘It will happen in a week. Sunday. Be ready.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘You will have half a day with her. Twelve hours. That’s not much. You can say no.’

‘I want this more than anything.’

‘All right. It’s done. Sunday. A twelve-hour visit, starting at noon. Remember – be ready.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I made a deal.’ Ice water drizzled from Morning’s body to the carpet.

‘The little girl in Leonardo’s painting, it wasn’t Aubrey?’

‘There is no Aubrey. It was—’

‘Holly?’

‘Yes.’

‘It looked just like her,’ George said knowingly. ‘It had to be her.’

‘The painting predicted the future,’ Morning confirmed. ‘Nostradamus saw correctly. Kiss me.’

They went to the periscope room, Morning leaning on him all the way. Periscope Number One gazed unflinchingly across the continent. Up and down the Transantarctic Mountain Range, the McMurdo Sound Agreement took its toll, millions dissolving, deserted by their minds and bodies, leaving behind scopas suits in lieu of corpses.

‘I don’t want to watch this,’ he said.

‘You’ve seen worse,’ she said.

He focused on the Ross Ice Shelf. The crater scooped out by the Battle of Wildgrove was but a footprint compared with the central crevasse. And then they came, marching proudly – those who preferred free will to the McMurdo Sound Agreement, friends holding hands, lovers locked together, women clutching children, children cuddling bears made of snow. In a vast white tide they hurled themselves over the ragged edge, platoons of unlived lives returning to the bedrock, generation upon generation losing the continent.

‘They were right to indict me,’ he muttered.

On a nearby nunatak a great bonfire flourished, flames against the snow, bright and red as an eye from the Midgard serpent. Led by Mother Mary Catherine, a hundred darkbloods moved toward the fire, each bearing an icon of ice. Warhead by warhead, delivery system by delivery system, the prosecution’s frozen arsenal was abolished. The Javelin cruise missile melted instantly. Then the Guardian Angel ICBM was salvoed. Next the Multiprong fizzled away, the MacArthur III, the Wasp-13 heavy bomber, the mine, the shell, the depth charge, the free-fall bomb. Cheers shook the glacier, and then the dancing started. Cocoa flooded into frigid throats, smiles brightened tired faces, and he saw that there was nothing like a clear, cold night of security destruction for bringing joy to an unadmitted heart.

‘Weaponless deterrence,’ said George.

‘What?’ said Morning.

‘A way to get rid of nuclear arsenals. Instead of missile deterring missile, factory deters factory. The Soviet and American strategists all see that any move toward rearmament on one side will be matched by the other side, until the world is back to mutual assured destruction. So nobody rearms.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘The knowledge of how to build them – that’s the real deterrent. I’m just beginning to understand.’

‘Sounds unstable.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did I tell you about my best friend? Sylvia? She had the strangest laugh you ever heard.’

Hour after hour they beheld the deaths, most anonymous, a few with names. Shawna Queen Jefferson evaporated while crossing the courtyard of the Ice Palace of Justice, her robe flapping in the wind like a great black wing. Alexander Aquinas went out attempting to preserve a copy of the verdict in a hole in one of the nunataks. As Gila Guizot began to fade, she grabbed her rifle and shot herself in the heart; liquid shadows rushed down the Antarctic National Police insignia on her breast. Jared Seldin, would-be star voyager, vaporized while crawling across the interior plateau trying to catch and befriend a baby penguin.

And everywhere, the suits. Suits lying in the streets of the ice limbos like massacred Armenians, littering the nunataks like slaughtered Huguenots, piled up in the dry valleys like purged kulaks, suits on hummocks and suits on bergs, clean white fossils of the race that had never known a single warm day.

A young woman stood on a berg calved from the Ross barrier. She paced back and forth, raised a trembling fist toward heaven. George had seen her during the trial, seated in the gallery, her gaze locked longingly on Aquinas. A screaming Antarctic gale whipped across the sea, throwing sub-zero water across the castaway’s white boat, slapping her cheeks, salting her eyes. Even during his therapy sessions George had not seen so much misery compacted into one face. It seemed almost a blessing when the McMurdo Sound Agreement finally caught up with this lost and lovesick girl.

‘I have never been dancing,’ Morning said two days later.

‘We’ll fix that,’ he replied.

‘Waltzing is nice, I hear.’

‘I can’t waltz.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Put on your waltzing clothes.’

He left. He had no plan, but he was a good husband, and he would think of something.

Silence enveloped the little movie theater, clinging to the walls, sinking into the seats. He entered the projection booth. The 16mm film cans were stacked in three wobbly towers. In the middle of the highest stack, sandwiched between Panic in the Year Zero and The End of August at the Hotel Ozone, he spotted what he wanted, the English-language version of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, all eight cans’ worth. He threaded up one of the middle reels, popped on the amplifier, pushed the lever to Forward. The projector grunted and squealed. Out in the theater, the narrator, goldenthroated Norman Rose, declared in a voice that seemed to belong to a doctor whose patients always got well, ‘If evil men can work together to get what they want, then so can good men, to get what they want.’ Moving to the audio patch panel, he began to experiment, plugging, unplugging, until at last the War and Peace sound-track roared through the ship’s intercom.

He returned to Morning and said, ‘May I have this dance?’

‘Delighted,’ she said and coughed. Her white silk kimono hung from her failing body.

They went to the main mess hall. The noises and voices of War and Peace echoed off the marble columns, clattered amid the crystal chandeliers. After setting her on a velvet sofa, he pushed tables aside, flung chairs away, rolled back the carpet.

Natasha Rostov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were waltzing now, Ludmilla Savelyeva as Natasha, Vyacheslav Tikhonov as Andrei, original film score by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov conducting one of the Moscow symphony orchestras.

George lifted his wife off the sofa and extended her arms. And they danced. A wise, benevolent god entered their blood, instructing them. Adeptly they revolved through the Russian palace, round and round, one two three, Ovchinnikov’s melody pouring through them, one two three, notes soaring, gleaming half notes, burnished quarter notes, then came the sixteenth notes, thin and silver, needles weaving airborne tapestries, one two three, and Morning was smiling, and the hall was hot, and now she was laughing, and it seemed as if the autumn-leaf red were back in her hair.

‘I’m so glad I married you,’ she said.

‘Would it have lasted?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Forever.’

The waltz quickened. Love blossomed between Natasha and Andrei.

‘You’re good at dancing,’ she said.

‘So are you,’ he said.

‘The sex part was good, too.’

‘First-rate, I thought.’

The orchestra reached full velocity. The notes burned as they struck the air.

‘I once heard that it’s great to have a dog jump in bed with you in the morning and lick your face,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ he said.

A dotted half note soared by, trailing fire.

‘Good-bye, husband,’ she said.

‘I’ll miss you,’ he said.

Her bones turned to balsa wood, and she threw all of her remaining substance into a kiss. Painlessly she quit the world, became dust, less than dust, a mute vibration, a thing never christened, born, or conceived, a notion kept only in the frail memory of a man staggering across a mess hall in an ice-bound nuclear submarine, carrying a silk kimono and weeping like an orphan.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Each midnight he walked the carpeted corridors of the City of New York, master of an empty ship, his ears turned to the sound of his boots, hoping their thumps would lull him to sleep. Sometimes he heard pale whisperings issue from some dark alley or forgotten passageway, but when he investigated there was nothing. In this sunken and deserted city even George’s own hallucinations declined to keep him company.

As dawn approached he would rub his eyes, force his face into a yawn, and collapse on the nearest bunk in a parody of exhaustion. Useless – Morpheus was not fooled. George stared at the ceiling, pawed at his blankets. And then, come noon, his teeth would begin grinding so briskly he expected to see sparks, and he knew that a new day was upon him. Did I dream? he would wonder. It pleased him to remember one, for this meant he had actually slept.

‘Be ready,’ Morning had said.

Monday, the tree. He went to the missile compartment and searched among the remaining specimens from Project Citrus, eventually finding the runt of the orchard, barely four feet high, perfect for his purposes, with frail branches and scrawny fruit – no question why it had not been among those selected for the honor of lynching a war criminal. He cut it down, bore it away, set it up in his cabin.

Tuesday, the ornaments. After securing a hammer from the torpedo room lower deck, he ran through the ship smashing every bright and gaudy object he could find – gyros, compasses, gauges, valves, pumps. He collected the shards in a duffel bag.

Wednesday and Thursday, the presents. His goal was ten. That seemed a substantial number for her to open, whereas twelve or fifteen would have smacked of overindulgence. He went to Sverre’s cabin and appropriated the white alabaster raven, the captain’s stovepipe hat, the globe, and an empty gin bottle. From the Silver Dollar Casino he took a stack of poker chips and a poster of a harlequin whose word balloon contained the rules for blackjack. He wrote the names of countries on the chips. The main galley yielded an assortment of utensils. He put them in a cardboard box, labeling it SUPER DUPER COOKING SET with a Navy-issue laundry marker. The library was a disappointment – not a single children’s book in the stacks. So he made one, transcribing the fable he had once improvised for her in which a bunny with Holly’s personality conquered self-doubt, learning to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. He illustrated it with stick figures.

For the ninth gift, George devised a rag doll out of patches and swatches cut from commissioned officers’ uniforms. Its eyes were brass buttons.

The final gift had been hanging in his closet for months.

Half a day. So short. Best to trim the tree in advance. After all, she would have all those presents to unwrap and play with. For hooks he used the paper clips that held the pages of Captain Sverre’s bad poetry together. By Friday afternoon the former orange tree had become a cheerful mass of glittery, twisted armatures and curled, nameless metal.

He beat the lid from a canned ham into a star. Christmas trees without stars on top were totally unacceptable. He moved the step-ladder into place…

Why am I lying on the floor? he wondered. What am I doing staring at the ceiling? He glanced at the rivet-studded walls, the unfinished tree. I am lying on the floor because there is no point to anything. People are extinct.

Midnight came. He stood up. ‘The point,’ he said aloud, ‘is that Holly and I are not extinct.’ He placed the star where it belonged.

Saturday, the final preparations. He wrapped the ten gifts in aluminum foil and set them under the tree, stacking and restacking them in an effort to find the perfect arrangement.

Sunday.

Seven AM.

Round and round the Christmas tree he cut a path of nervousness and doubt, periodically stopping to rearrange the presents or reposition an ornament. She wouldn’t like the doll. She would start fussing. Something…

Eight AM Nine AM Ten AM.

After Chester the cat had died, they had decided to give him a proper burial, complete with a little headstone inscribed CHESTER that George had prepared at the Crippen Monument Works from a stray scrap of granite. Holly hated the whole idea; she refused to attend the funeral and screamed at her parents for dreaming it up. But the very next day, just as George and Justine had predicted, she began telling everyone about the big event – the monument, the grave, the cardboard coffin from the veterinarian – and continued doing so for months…

Eleven AM.

Justine had blown up a tarantula. This was really pretty funny when you thought about it…

Noon.

Outside the cabin: quick, trundling footsteps. Veins throbbed frantically in George’s neck and wrists, seeming almost to break free of his body. His bullet wound ached, and he breathed deeply. Dear God, make this a good day.

A little girl ran into the cabin. Her feet cycled furiously. Her arms opened wide.

‘Daddy! Daddy!’ Though raspy – a cold coming? – her voice still had the angelic tone that George had never heard in any child except his.

‘Holly!’

They embraced, the child giggling and trilling, George weeping. She was warm. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and blocked his incipient tears, Holly being too young to comprehend why anyone would weep out of happiness.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ he said.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said.

The war had taken its toll. Her hair looked like yarn. Her smile was interrupted by far more missing teeth than the predations of the tooth fairy alone could explain. She moved cringingly, with a slight limp. But her green eyes sparkled, her face was incandescent, she still had her wonderful compactness, and it was her, it was her!

‘Ahh – look at the tree!’ Holly shouted.

‘Do you like it? You can actually eat those oranges.’

‘No thank you. It’s beautiful. It has a star on top. That reminds me of something.’

‘What?’

‘Those Halloween trees we used to put up.’

‘Yes. We hung rubber bats on them.’

‘And little pumpkins. They were so cute.’

‘I want us to have Christmas,’ George said. ‘You did not get Christmas this year. This was because of the war.’ He was always careful to speak in complete, grammatical sentences around her.

‘Daddy, I have something very sad to tell you. This is important.’

‘What?’

‘This is important. Mommy died.’

‘You are right. It’s very sad. The war killed her.’

‘I know that,’ she said, mildly annoyed.

‘You gave her orange juice, didn’t you?’

‘She died anyway.’

‘Holly, Holly, it’s so good to have you here. See those presents down there?’

‘Are they for me?’

‘Yes. They’re all for you.’

‘All of them? All? Oh, Daddy, thank you, thank you. I’m so excited.’

‘Why don’t you start with this one?’ he said, handing her the gin bottle. She sheared away the aluminum foil. ‘A flower vase,’ he explained.

‘Later could we pick a flower?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’

Lunging for the big box, she stripped it bare. ‘That says, “Super Duper Cooking Set,”’ her father explained.

She pulled back the lid, took out the dishes, cups, saucers, pots, pans, kettles, and tureens. ‘Oh, Daddy, I love it, I love it. Will you play cooking with me?’

‘I think maybe we should finish the unwrapping.’

‘Then will you play with me?’

‘Of course.’ Apprehensively he picked up the doll. ‘Try this.’ She tore at the foil. ‘I know you wanted a Mary Merlin,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t find any.’

‘Couldn’t Santa Claus either?’

‘The stores were out of them.’

‘That’s okay.’ Holly kissed the doll and stroked its hair. ‘I like her so much. Her name is Jennifer.’

She put Jennifer to bed in a roasting pan from the Super Duper Cooking Set, covering her with a blanket of aluminum foil. Next George gave his daughter the white alabaster raven. She unwrapped it, named it Birdie, and laid it next to Jennifer. Soon the doll and the raven were fast asleep.

‘Be very quiet, Daddy.’

‘Okay.’

‘I want to pick out the next one.’

‘Sure.’

She yanked the stovepipe hat from the pile, unwrapped it. Making no comment, she put it on and grinned her ragged, episodic grin. Now the bright cylinder caught her eye. Bits of foil took to the air. ‘Oh, a clown!’ she said, unscrolling the harlequin poster. ‘He’s funny. I want to hang him up.’ They taped the poster to a bulkhead.

‘And now you’ve got this one,’ George said. Gleefully she ripped the foil. ‘It’s a story I once told you,’ he explained. ‘A bunny wants to ride a two-wheeler bike, and—’

‘Read it to me.’

Done.

‘Read it again.’

He did.

‘Read it again.’

‘You’ve got another present over here.’

‘I’ll bet it’s a beach ball.’ She pulled apart the wrapping, continued beaming even after the beach ball proved to be a globe. ‘What does it do?’

‘It shows us what the world is like. Well, it’s really a kind of game.’

‘Let’s play it.’

‘Okay. You need this thing over here.’ He handed her the poker chips, and she unwrapped them. ‘You see, they have the names of countries on them. Everybody gets ten. Then you spin the globe like this, and you keep your eyes closed, and you put your finger out the way I’m doing. And if your finger stops on a country that’s the same as one of your chips, then you—’

‘Is that last present for me too?’ Holly asked, removing her stovepipe hat and waving it toward the tree.

‘Yes. It’s from Santa Claus.’

She freed her civil defense gear from its foil. ‘Oooh, a gold one. Pretty.’

‘It’s called a scopas suit.’

‘I know that.’

‘I thought you might like to dress up in it.’

‘Nice. What’s the matter with the glove?’

‘Something hit it.’

‘Let’s play tea party. I’ll be the sister. You be the visitor.’

Holly distributed her new cooking things around the coffee table. She set out Sverre’s gin bottle, filling it with several tree ornaments that vaguely resembled flowers. The raven was invited, and the doll, and the visitor, and also the scopas suit, which Holly decided was a scarecrow. Everyone had invisible cake and gossamer ice cream. During the course of the afternoon, the scarecrow’s name went from Suzy to Margaret to Alfred.

Later she played alone, giving Birdie, Jennifer, and Alfred their bottles, putting them in for their naps. Outside the submarine, the black of day gave way to the black of night.

Father and daughter went to the galley and had Christmas dinner. The stale pretzels were scrumptious. They sneaked extra sugar into their cocoa.

When they were back in the cabin, George said, ‘Holly, would you like a horsey ride?’

‘No.’

He was grievously disappointed.

Ten seconds later she said, ‘Give me a horsey ride.’

For George it was to be a test. All previous horsey rides had ended with him insisting that he was too tired to continue. In truth he had been too bored. Each time, he had received the impression that there was no point at which Holly herself would end the ride, that she would more likely fall asleep in the saddle.

She climbed atop his big equine shoulders, and he galloped down the corridor. The pressure on his spine was extraordinarily pleasant. Waving her stovepipe hat, she urged him on. ‘Turn… down here, Horsey… go through the door… that’s the way, Horsey.’

Fifteen minutes passed. Horsey became bored. He thought: how can this be? Yet there it was, boredom. I shall keep going, he told himself. Nothing will stop this horsey ride, nothing.

‘This reminds me of something,’ Holly said.

‘What?’ Horsey asked.

‘That ride you put the money in. Back home. Oh, I wish we were home again, Daddy. I miss my kitty.’

‘Horsey is tired now,’ he said. The lump in Horsey’s throat felt like a stuck walnut. ‘Horsey wants to go sleep in the stable.’

‘Can we play that game? The one with the world in it?’

‘Sure, honey.’

Back in the cabin, they made a half-hearted attempt at playing the stupid game. Holly became frustrated and ornery. ‘How about another round of Bicycle Bunny?’ he suggested.

They read it in the bunk, huddled beneath blankets. After it was over, she said, ‘This book reminds me of something. Long ago, when I was very little, like three or something, you used to read me a book about the beach.’

‘Carrie of Cape Cod. We read it lots of times last fall.’

‘Remember the part about the Big Spoon?’

‘The Big Dipper. Yes.’

‘Could we go see the Big Dipper? I mean, now could we see it?’

‘All right,’ he said, dragging her scopas suit away from the tea party, ‘But you’ll have to wear this. It’s cold out there.’

‘No, no, that’s Alfred Scarecrow!’ she shrieked.

‘Here’s the deal, honey. If you don’t put this on, we can’t go see the Big Dipper. I’m going to wear one too.’

‘Birdie wants to come.’

‘Sure.’

He girded his daughter against the elements. The suit fit perfectly. She looked adorable in it, her round, glowing face popping from the gold collar. To compensate for the bullet-shattered glove, he wrapped her hand in silk strips torn from the bedsheets.

He scooped her up, carried her and Birdie through half a mile of corridor, pausing briefly to remove an electric lantern from a bulkhead and hook it around his wrist. Twenty risers spiraled from the navigation room to the first sail deck. At the door he stopped and said, ‘Honey, there’s something I want to ask.’

‘What?’

‘Do you know what’s happened to you?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘What’s happened to you?’

‘I don’t want to tell you.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘You know what’s happened.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I died.’

A thick stratum of snow covered the outside deck, sealing the missile doors. Ice flowed from the diving planes in silver sheets and drooped from the periscopes like the web of some monstrous Antarctic spider. Ragged bergs squeezed the hull from all sides, locking it tight against the barrier.

‘Oh, great!’ Holly said. ‘It’s been snowing! Look, Daddy, it’s been snowing!’

He did not want to tell her that it did not snow in Antarctica, that the crystals were simply redistributed by the winds.

She looked up. The stars were sharp and bright. ‘Is it there? Can we see the Big Dipper?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I think I see it.’

‘Honey, I just realized something. We’re in the Southern Hemisphere—’

‘Is that it?’ she asked, thrusting her stubby, insulated fingers heavenward.

He studied the sky. Amorphous clusters. Meaningless forms. ‘Yes, honey, I think that’s it.’

‘You’re just saying that! We can’t see the Big Dipper!’

‘I’m sorry, honey. I’m really sorry. We’re too far south, and—’

‘It’s okay, Daddy. Put me down.’ He lowered his arms, and she slid into the crusty snow. Groans filled the air as ice and hull ground against each other. ‘I love you, Daddy.’

‘I love you, too, Holly.’

‘Mommy couldn’t come,’ she said softly.

‘Yes. That’s very sad.’

‘We couldn’t see the Big Dipper.’

‘Yes. That’s sad too.’

A wind blew up, churning the snow, tossing iceballs against the sail. ‘Thank you for all the presents,’ she said. ‘I love that doll. This has been a great Christmas.’

‘It’s been the best Christmas ever,’ he said.

‘I have to go now.’

‘No! You can’t go!’

‘I really like that cooking set, and I had fun playing visitor with you. And thank you for Birdie. And be sure to take care of Jennifer. She gets her bottle at six o’clock midnight.’

‘Please stay, Holly! Please! You’re not allowed to go yet!’ He ripped a gob of wolverine hair out of his parka hood. ‘I need to tell you a bedtime story. It’s about an elf who casts a golden shadow. Please! So one day the elf’s uncle asked him to—’

‘Good-bye, Daddy.’

They hugged, squeezing so hard it should have hurt.

‘Please don’t go, Holly! Please!’

‘Good-bye, Daddy. I love you.’

‘Good-bye, darling. I love you so much. I love you so much.’

She worked free of his grip, coasted bum-down along the hull as if it were a sliding board. Her stovepipe hat fell off. Now George could hear snow crunching under her little boots. The starlight caught her golden suit, so that a figure made of phosphor moved across the barrier toward Lazarev. She clutched Birdie tighter, ran faster, and was soon swallowed by the darkness and the gale.

Vanity of vanities. George had actually believed he could save his species. And yet, despite the scale of his failure, he had not reverted to his old, unambitious ways. He expected things now. God owed him. Tirelessly, enterprisingly, he dashed across the Lazarev Ice Shelf. I’ll go to whomever Morning made that deal with, he thought. They’ll let me keep my child. They must.

His lantern was strong, more than equal to an Antarctic blizzard, and he had no trouble keeping Holly in view. She was only four, and unsteady, and burdened with a scopas suit and Birdie. He called her name. The wind threw it back in his face. Bits of ice sailed past, pelting his forehead, slicing his cheeks. He wished that he were unadmitted, so that his memories would be fogged, but instead the images all boasted a brutal clarity: Holly’s first trip to the zoo, Holly being a bug for Halloween…

The crevasses of Antarctica are predatory, hungry, lying in wait. Holly did not notice the great Novolazarevkaya Crevasse. One second she was running, the next she was gone, falling in a flash of golden scopas threads.

George cursed the crevasse aloud, vowing to defeat it as totally as Sverre’s navy had defeated the invalidated past. Already he was at the brink, throwing himself on his stomach, extending his lantern arm. The beam spilled downward, illuminating flying whorls of snow and a child’s figure pressed against the wall, her boots frozen to a feeble lip of ice. George saw two frightened green eyes, heard whimpering. His muscles and tendons creaked, nearly tearing apart as he fought for an extra inch of reach.

The tomb inscriber proved stronger than himself. He touched something soft, seized it. He yanked. Her silk-wrapped hand came forward, safe in his, but it was strangely, horribly weightless.

‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way!’ a voice shouted from out of the storm.

George stared at the awful object he was holding. The wrist was cut. A plastic tube poked through the crack. At the fractured elbow, ball bearings and copper wire protruded. The stump of the upper arm was a fountain of yellow hydraulic fluids; the technological blood gushed from rubber veins, spilled around steel bones, and dripped onto the Lazarev Ice Shelf.

Dressed in his diamond-patterned scopas suit, Theophilus Carter ambled into view. Icicles grew from his nostrils like tusks and drooped from the inside brim of his top hat like crystalline hair. His gloves were stuck to a teapot. In the murky distance, the lights of his itinerant shop (‘Remarkable Things for Human Bodies’) burned through the blizzard.

Again Theophilus said, ‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way…’

George hurled the puppet arm into the dark whistling pit, and when Holly’s double looked up at him he lost consciousness and collapsed on the ice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Smells cut through his brain, forcing him into the world. Formaldehyde. Viscera. How different from the odorless continent, how different from the prophylactic City of New York. He was pleased to find himself on the MAD Hatter’s hospital gurney. Good. He’s planning to take me apart. He’s going to stuff me with circuits and pumps. I’ll become Plato or Julius Caesar or George Washington.

Like a speeding subway car, the laboratory vibrated and lurched, winds spurting through the cracks in its walls. The organs trembled in their jars, the severed arms bumped against the walls of their tanks, and the skeletons flounced on their ceiling hooks like chandeliers of bone.

Airborne.

The Hatter waddled over with a tea tray. He had shed his scopas suit, leaving himself attired in his morning coat and vest.

George tried to speak, but his vocal cords were iced up. He poured himself tea, drank. ‘I had no idea there was such cruelty in the world.’

‘Strange words from a convicted war criminal. Your loving bride wanted to give you a day of happiness, that’s all. We calculated we could sustain the drama for twelve hours. Call it cruelty if you like, deception, a ruse, though a ruse by any other name would smell as sweet. I call it a gift.’

‘She said she had made a deal,’ George protested.

‘With whom? Extinction? Stop living in a dream world. You can’t make deals with extinction – I told you that back in the city. The deal was with yours truly. Your bride gave me some free therapy, so I gave her a free automaton. The therapy proved useless, as we knew it would. Assured destruction is a hopeless disease.’

Rising from the gurney – his neck was stiff from Holly’s horsey ride – George followed the Hatter out of the laboratory and into the shop. A pile of scopas suit sales contracts lay on the counter. The mannequins’ shoulders pushed through their rotting costumes like cantaloupes tearing through grocery bags. The two men walked to the bellied window, leaned toward its congestion of hats. Theophilus traded his top hat for a bejeweled crown. George put on a homburg and stared at the birdless sky. Dark, bloated clouds floated by like plumes from the stacks of a weapons factory.

‘Ever since the war,’ said the Hatter, ‘your child has been a lot of random molecules. You knew that. You always knew that. All the King’s accountants and all the King’s lawyers couldn’t put… so I built her from scratch. Your wife gave me a nursery school photograph plus relevant data. The Big Dipper, everything. I programmed the reunion well, n’est-ce pas?’

The shop began to roll and pitch. The mannequins flapped their arms. Frantic tintinnabulations arose from the bells over the door.

‘Admit it, things went swimmingly,’ said the Hatter. ‘A bit mawkish for my tastes – yours, too, probably – but on the whole, swimmingly.’

George noticed how cadaverous Professor Carter had become. His pink hair was almost white, and his skin looked like stale cheese. The four-in-hand tie surrounded a neck as narrow and coarse as a loaf of French bread. Only one of his rabbit teeth remained, and it was black and cracked.

Stripping himself naked, the Hatter went to a mannequin dressed in royal regalia. ‘Help me with this, will you?’

Together they hauled down the coronation mantle, which was as heavy and bulky as an Oriental rug, and placed it around Theophilus’s tiny shoulders. Immediately he toppled under the weight. His crown fell off. ‘When you’re a king,’ he gasped, propping himself up on one elbow, ‘people are less likely to notice that you’re insane.’ Through a miracle of effort, he got into a sitting position. ‘One more favor.’ He petted the ermine on his capelet. ‘Crown me.’

George lowered the wonderful sparkling hat over Theophilus’s dead hair. ‘How do I look?’ the Hatter asked.

‘Splendid.’

He really did, in a way.

‘Off with their heads! Bring on the dancing girls! Turn away those petitioners! Maximize those strategic options!’

For nearly an hour he sat in the corner, raving quietly. George brought him tea.

‘Enhance that deterrence! Put Humpty-Dumpty together again! Let them eat cake!’

He motioned George over with his scepter. The tomb inscriber bent low. ‘Au revoir, my friend.’ The Hatter drank tea. ‘The odds, however, are against it.’

And then, slowly, graciously, as the shop settled onto the ground, Good King Theophilus began his long reign over nothing.

George stepped through the door. He held his lantern high. More immortal than Egypt’s pyramids, the Ice Palace of Justice rose against the verbose slopes of Mount Christchurch, pennants shivering, spires skewering black clouds. JUSTICE IS SERVED, the mountain said.

There was no storm here, only a mournful wind bearing the smoky odor of scopas suit insulation. Everywhere he glanced, from the bellied shop window to the limits of his light and beyond, the suits covered the glacial tongue like cocoons abandoned by some huge and over-propagated species of moth. He wanted to have some really profound response to the situation but could not manage it. So, he thought, this is it: no more people, not a one, no admitteds, no unadmitteds, nobody. My, my.

But then, growling mechanically, a Sno-Cat emerged from the gloom, stopping before the Mad Tea Party. An old woman got out, one arm bowed around her scopas suit helmet, the other gripping a cane made of ice. She scuttled forward.

‘Hello, George.’

‘Mrs Covington?’

‘This foolish glacier is almost as cold as your monument works.’ Bands of snow flashed through Nadine’s gray hair.

‘It’s good to see you again, ma’am.’ Despite the cold, the waves of well-being managed to reach him. ‘I was certain your little sailboat would be swamped.’

‘The documents barge picked me up.’

‘You saw the trial?’

‘I caught your part. Don’t worry, George, nothing you could have said would have changed the verdict… So, tell me, did Leonardo’s painting predict the future?’

‘I saw my daughter again.’ He fixed on the dark effluvium coming from the Cat’s tailpipe. ‘But it wasn’t her – it just seemed like her. You shouldn’t have raised my hopes.’

‘You raised your hopes.’

‘I went to that marble city like you said I should, and I found Professor Carter, and he made me fertile, and it didn’t matter.’

‘That’s the way things go in these post-exchange environments. Remember the good old days, when you wrote those epitaphs for me in Massachusetts? “She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here,” right?’ She pointed her ice cane toward the Cat. ‘It’s warm in the cab, and we have work to do.’

They drove past a dozen deserted ice limbos and ten thousand bereft scopas suits. Once the Cat was atop the glacial tongue, Nadine headed for the eastern face of the nunatak and drove up the slope. Five ice-sealed corpses swung on their living gibbets.

The Cat stopped before Brat Tarmac’s remains. Drops of frozen blood hung from his bullet wounds like tears leaving blind eyes. George climbed to the roof, a hacksaw wrapped tightly in his glove. He peeled off the belt that held the general’s man-portable thermonuclear device, buckled it around his own waist. He went to work on the cable. The grinning blade groaned and shrieked. Brat tumbled to the roof. George laid him out carefully, as he had seen them do with the deceased at the Montefiore Funeral Home.

Nadine drove to the next tree. Overwhite’s beard was a fretwork of icicles and frost. George sawed him down.

Then Randstable. Sparrow. Wengernook, who looked nervous even in death.

After stacking the heavy, rigid bodies in the back of the Cat, he returned to Sparrow’s tree. Had his eyes tricked him? No, there it was, a little Bible, frozen solid. He picked it up.

Latitude: 79 degrees 38 minutes south.

Longitude: 169 degrees 15 minutes east.

Pushing up from the ice was a stone reminiscent of the megalith George had inspected at the Snape’s Hill Burial Grounds. On this spot, only eleven miles from supplies, Robert Falcon Scott had perished after failing to become the first human to reach the South Pole.

The inscribed monument left George with the impression that Scott felt worse about being bettered by a Norwegian than he did about starving to death.

‘Of course, he might just as easily have been born the Norwegian and Amundsen the Britisher,’ said Nadine, ‘in which case Scott would have been glad that Amundsen won.’

‘Not if Scott was Norwegian, no.’

‘Why?’

‘Because then a Britisher would have won.’

‘I don’t understand.’

A pick swayed from the rear door of the Cat. George assaulted the Ross Ice Shelf. Sub-zero winds bore away the sound of metal striking ice; white sparks shot into the air. Gradually the pit expanded until it was large enough to admit all five bodies. With Nadine’s help he lowered his friends into the darkness. ‘Do you hate them?’ he asked.

‘I hate their bad ideas,’ she replied.

‘We should say a few words.’

‘Go ahead.’

For ten minutes George struggled with the frozen Bible. Trying to open it was like trying to rip granite. At last he made a fissure slightly beyond the middle – on Ecclesiastes, a set of existential essays that had been included in the Bible by mistake. It was a favorite with Unitarians. Poor Reverend Sparrow would no doubt have preferred something more tumultuous – Ezekiel, Zephaniah, the Revelation – but this would have to do.

‘Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard,’ George read. ‘Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good,’ he continued. ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the perfumer to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly outweigh wisdom and honor,’ he concluded.

‘That was very nice,’ said Nadine.

The tomb inscriber climbed into the grave, unzipped Reverend Sparrow’s suit, and placed the splayed book against his heart.

Once George was back on the surface, they filled in the hole with ice and snow, Nadine all the while reminiscing aloud about her husband Nathaniel, each nugget of memory receiving detailed review, Nathaniel Covington the poet, Nathaniel Covington the great lover.

From the Cat’s tool box the old woman procured a hammer and a chisel. It took George an hour to wipe the Scott Monument clean. Nadine held the lantern steady as he laid down his guidelines with chalk. Tongue pressed firmly against his mustache, he began to ply his trade.

The hammer pounded. The chisel danced.

He did a fine, professional job – Nadine said so. The characters all had serifs.

Later, as the old woman lay propped against a hummock, her voice fading, her flesh expiring, George asked, ‘Why did you entrap me?’

Nadine attempted to lever herself to her feet using her ice cane, thought better of the idea, settled back against the hummock. ‘If they hadn’t sent me to Wildgrove,’ she said softly, ‘they would have sent someone else. When I saw what name the McMurdo framers had picked, I volunteered.’ Mischief glinted in her eyes. ‘I wanted to see you as you were before the war. I had to meet you, George, touch you. And Holly.’ She moved her shriveled head toward him. ‘Look at me. Do you see it? My face, your face, my face…’

He did.

The old woman’s smile was a triumph of determination over materials. Missing teeth, weak face muscles, but still she beamed.

‘You’re my granddaughter, aren’t you?’ he said.

They fell into each other’s arms.

‘Holly was your mother,’ he said.

‘The only tolerable moments of my unadmittance came when I watched her at nursery school. I wish I’d gotten to baby-sit for her.’

‘And your father was…?’

‘John Frostig’s youngest son.’

‘Rickie?’

‘Nickie.’

‘The hamster killer?’

‘He would have grown up.’

‘Just like Holly.’

‘You would have been proud of her, Grandfather.’

‘She always said she wanted to be an artist.’

‘She became a teacher. To the first graders she was Socrates and Mother Goose combined. There’s no way she could ever see all the good she did – more good than if she’d become an artist. She was better than she knew.’

‘I wonder if she ever got to see the Big Dipper.’

Nadine kissed his ragged beard. ‘I’m sure she would have.’

‘I’ll bet you’re a hell of a baby-sitter,’ he said.

‘A world beater.’

‘First grade?’ he said. ‘A worthy profession, don’t you think? Honorable. Challenging. Yes, that’s perfect. First grade… If you were to have an epitaph on your monument, what would it be?’

She coughed. ‘I don’t want an epitaph, or a monument either. We did not get in. Don’t pretend that we did.’

‘All right.’

They held hands, scopas glove pressed against scopas glove. Her rough and lovely cheek melted beneath his lips like butter. He saw her suit deflate slightly, felt tissues and bones leaving her glove. He stood up.

The MARCH Hare’s little missile clung parasitically to George’s waist. He unstrapped it. How did such things work? It needed a code – is that what the deputy prosecutor had said? – and a brass key.

Seizing the buckle, he whipped the belt around as if it were a sling. The bomb whistled. It struck the Scott Monument squarely. A stabilizer broke off, twirled away.

Again he smashed the weapon, and again he smashed it, and again – smashed it in the names of Morning Valcourt and Justine Paxton, smashed it while thinking of the nonexistent first-graders Holly had never taught – until the thing was nothing but springs, detonators, Styrofoam chunks, uranium-238 fragments, and deuterium core pieces strewn across the grave site, not much of a plowshare, but not much of a man-portable thermonuclear device either.

George looked at his granddaughter’s empty suit. He thought of Job. Satan lacked imagination. To crack a man’s faith, one need not resort to burning his flesh, ruining his finances, or any such obvious afflictions. One need only take a man’s species away from him.

There was laughter in Antarctica. Every ice crystal mocked him. The great crevasse of the Ross Ice Shelf spread through his mind. His granddaughter had wanted no monument. Very well, he thought, then I don’t want one either. The cold was like a disease. His bowels seemed frozen. There was frost on his bones, sleet in his lungs. He looked up. The sky was dark – dark as unadmitted blood, dark as the crevasse that was his destination – and then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw stars, not the Big Dipper but the crisp hot lights that men had named the Southern Cross.

He got in the Cat, turned on the engine, and started across the young, disarmed planet.