This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  Walled off from the mob by a brigade of police, a score of dissidents waved banners: FREE PAXTON…NO SYMBOLIC 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 man-portable 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 18

  In Which Our Hero and His Mate Visit a Garden of Ice and One of Earthly Delights

  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 t
he 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 fiancée 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.”