This Is the Way the World Ends (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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This Is the Way the World Ends (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 13

by James Morrow


  ‘Do any of you know what he’s talking about?’ said Brat.

  ‘Oh, dear, I think so,’ said Randstable. ‘Oh, God.’

  Sverre picked up the knife, which was long and shiny with fat. What happened next would visit George’s dreams for many nights to come. Slowly, wincingly, Sverre opened his arm. Arteries came asunder. Muscles perished. A lustrous black liquid spurted from the wound, as if someone had drilled for, and found, oil in his flesh. A sulphurous odor rushed out. Once on the tablecloth, the blood did not die, but collected itself into a viscous lump. The lump became a small, screaming, human head with a face that bore a disquieting resemblance to Sverre’s.

  ‘We are the inheritors who can never take title,’ said the bleeding captain. ‘We are the darkblood multitudes whose ancestors were exterminated before they could sire us,’ asserted the pilot of the City of New York.

  He sat down, pressed a napkin against his wound, and anesthetized himself with gin. The blood-head dissolved into a puddle.

  ‘We are the unadmitted,’ said Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre of the United States Navy.

  Nuclear war entails many surprising effects. George had learned this from his therapist. The unadmitted . . .

  Overwhite’s lips encircled words he could not voice. Brat looked dredged in flour. Wengernook tore the unlit cigarette from his mouth and eviscerated it. An aura of wrath surrounded Reverend Sparrow. ‘Foul wizard!’ he cried. ‘ “But the abominable and sorcerers shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire!” ’ he quoted.

  ‘Mercy! A discontinuity!’ gasped Randstable, pulling a pocket calculator from his vest.

  ‘You mean it’s a trick?’ said George.

  ‘Trick? No – a quantum aberration.’ Randstable stroked the little keyboard. ‘Normally such things happen only at the subatomic level, when your pions and antineutrinos and so on burst out of nothing as vacuum fluctuations.’ A string of zeros appeared on the display screen. ‘In the macroworld, where you have your people and so on, the expected frequency of such an event is very, very low – just shy of zero, in fact.’

  The captain told of his locked-out race. He took his guests back to the time of the materializations, bade them see the Antarctic glaciers gestate men, women, and children, each scheduled to gain the continent at the high point of his would-be life, the time of greatest fulfillment and promise.

  ‘Watch us rise through the ice, crack into the frigid dawn, rub the snow from our eyes, stretch our hypothetical limbs. My parents were killed in the Battle of Washington exactly two weeks before they would have conceived me. I would have gone to Annapolis. I would have served my country with honor and distinction. I would have—’

  Bypassing the goblet, Sverre drank directly from the bottle.

  ‘Do you know what our outrage was worth? A year. A year is nothing, gentlemen. Half my life is already gone. I can tell you how many hours I have left. How many minutes.’

  Faces jumped into George’s brain. Nadine Covington. Theophilus Carter. Ensign Peach. Darkbloods all.

  Morning Valcourt.

  Was she one of them? Was Aubrey’s mother a woman from the future?

  ‘If unadmitted, you must use your sojourn well,’ said Sverre. ‘A year is nothing.’

  First priority – get warm. And so you become pirates, plundering the scopas suit barges on their transpacific crossings.

  ‘Such attire is excellent for keeping out the cold,’ the captain explained.

  A year. Nothing. You cannot raise a family in a year. You cannot forge a great republic. But you can, with luck, after making appropriate political arrangements, track down certain key individuals and call them to account. So you build a courthouse. Judge’s bench. Witness stand. Prisoner’s dock. A Multiprong submarine lies at the bottom of McMurdo Sound. Unadmitted Navy frogmen bring her up. You set sail. You snatch six men from the jaws of the holocaust. You want more – President Orlaff, Senator Krogh, the Secretary of the Navy, the National Security Advisor – but they are already dead.

  ‘Courthouse?’ Brat tried to eat a forkful of German chocolate cake, failed. ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘Courthouse,’ muttered Randstable.

  ‘We want admittance,’ said Sverre. ‘Instead we must settle for knowledge. You will tell us why this war was necessary. Consider how fortunate you are. We could have left you to the flames, as we elected to do with them. The others. Their gimcrack Party, their bankrupt Marxism, their outrageous pretensions – all blessedly extinct. You, by contrast, are ambiguous. You don’t add up. It was your ambiguousness that saved you, that alone.’

  George had never thought of himself as being ambiguous.

  ‘Surely you don’t presume to lay this tragedy at our feet,’ grumbled Overwhite. ‘We did everything in our power to prevent—’

  ‘Er, wait a minute, Brian,’ said Randstable. ‘Surely they do presume to lay this tragedy at our feet. I mean, when you consider that the alternative is . . . you know. The extinction loop.’

  ‘You have no jurisdiction over us,’ said Wengernook. ‘Zero. None. Nada.’

  A new voice said, ‘I’m afraid that’s not true.’

  Sverre’s table companion was standing. ‘The McMurdo Sound Agreement charters an International Military and Civilian Tribunal,’ asserted the young man as he devoured a glob of lemon meringue pie. ‘The first appendix lists the counts against you. Have no fear – we shall challenge the competence of the court as soon as the trial begins.’

  George’s appetite for dessert, a primary drive not long ago, was completely gone. Counts against us? Trial? All because of some ridiculous sales contract?

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Brat.

  ‘Your advocate. Martin Bonenfant, unadmitted counsel for the defense. My staff and I have been hired to argue your case before the judges. I strongly recommend that you retain us.’

  ‘We don’t need a goddamn lawyer,’ asserted Wengernook.

  Bonenfant raked his fingers through his glossy black hair. ‘Yes, you do – though your case is much better than you might suppose. We’ve been researching your enemy’s morals, as well as the many imaginative ways you sought to prevent mutual destruction. Do you realize that the Soviets violated the spirit and at times the letter of both STABLE agreements?’ He devoured more lemon meringue pie. ‘And if all else fails, I’ve got a rabbit or two in my hat. I believe we should go for acquittals, count by count.’

  He’s so young, George thought. They sent a child to defend us.

  ‘Yes, an acquittal strategy is certainly the way to play this one,’ muttered Randstable. Turning, he solicited his co-defendants with large, clumsy gestures. ‘Let me put it this way. A photon that doesn’t exist can borrow energy from the uncertainty relation to make a real positron-electron pair, which annihilates to produce the photon that created it in the first place.’

  ‘Sounds like witchcraft,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘No,’ said Randstable. ‘Physics.’

  Slowly, anxiously, Bonenfant licked lemon muck from his lips. For the unadmitted, evidently, there was urgency in every pleasure. He explained that, if let upon the earth, he would have been a civil liberties lawyer living in Philadelphia. He would have defended child murderers and neo-Nazis.

  George stood up. ‘I would like to assert here and now that I am—’

  The event that kept him from saying ‘innocent,’ stopping his tongue as abruptly as an arrow stops a bird in flight, was the sudden arrival of the City of New York’s officers and men. Lieutenant Grass, Ensign Peach, Ensign Cobb, Lieutenant Brust, Chief Petty Officer Rush – and over two hundred others. Down the spiral staircase they came, straight into the main mess hall, a roiling mob.

  Snatching steak knives from the banquet table, the front-line officers slashed themselves, then passed the knives to the waiting sailors. Chandelier light sparkled in the black rivers. Clouds of burning sulphur rolled through the mess hall. Unadmitted blood filled the wine glasses and frosted the desserts; it s
peckled Wengernook’s brow, splattered Sparrow’s hair, rushed down Randstable’s cheeks, matted Overwhite’s beard, stuck to Brat’s hands, pooled in George’s lap.

  ‘Admit us!’ cried the nullified descendants. ‘Let us in!’

  A swamp of blood collected in the center of the table. It swirled and bubbled, spitting out ashes. As Peach and Cobb gestured toward the vortex, something took form – an ebony sculpture rising awkwardly from the ghostly tissues.

  A model scaffold. A miniature noose. A little hanging corpse – a doll two feet long, its face a blob, its tongue lolling on black lips. Slowly, drippingly, like a reverse-motion film of a melting figurine, features emerged, eyes, nose, mouth.

  George reached into his pocket and drew out his Leonardo. This family is mine, he told himself. No canceled generations can take it from me.

  ‘Count One – Crimes Against Peace!’ screamed Peach.

  ‘Count Two – War Crimes!’ screamed Cobb.

  ‘Count Three – Crimes Against Humanity!’

  ‘Count Four – Crimes Against the Future!’

  The sculpted corpse had acquired Wengernook’s face. It wept tears of ink.

  The cousins blew on the scaffold. The black oozy face transmogrified. Now Randstable was being executed for war crimes. Now Sparrow. Overwhite. Brat.

  ‘They’re just trying to scare us,’ said the general.

  ‘They’re succeeding,’ said Randstable.

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

  George pressed his lips to the painting, kissed Holly’s stepsister. He looked at the doll, saw what he knew was coming, a relentless transformation of the Brat-face into a George-face. He had always wished his nose was smaller. There will be a birth, he vowed. For unto us an Aubrey Paxton will be born. Nostradamus was on to something. I am innocent. Aubrey will be admitted to the good, resilient earth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In Which by Taking a Step Backward the City of New York Brings Our Hero a Step Forward

  Morning finished reading the last chapter of Merribell Braddock’s Scarlet Passions, closed the book, and, without particularly meaning to, sighed.

  Before her career was cut short by the end of the world, Merribell Braddock had single-handedly contributed over three hundred titles to the genre of romantic fiction. Scarlet Passions was as false as Olaf Sverre’s left eye, and yet, because it described the love of a woman for a man, Morning was touched. Poor extinct Merribell had reached right into Morning’s throat and raised a lump. The guileful author was making her see that her feelings for George – for his rough body and deceptively simple personality – definitely qualified as romantic.

  ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’ he said to her as he entered the office.

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The unadmitted. I love a shadow.’

  ‘I’m human,’ she said. ‘I’m human, and you love your dead wife, and I’m not her.’

  George released a sharp, explosive moan. Why bring up Justine? Wasn’t it their duty to focus on the future? ‘You’re asking me to believe there were no unadmitted therapists in Antarctica? They had to go outside their race?’

  ‘The McMurdo framers failed to anticipate the survivor’s guilt problem. When they went to Chicago to kidnap Randstable, I offered my services. I was given an audience with Sverre. He hired me. No pay – but I would get to live out my life, such as it is.’

  She removed the sacrificial knife from the wall and rested the blade against her wrist.

  ‘My blood is as red as yours, George. It’s as red as the blood of the innocents whose hearts were excised by this knife.’

  He thought of her coming pain, winced. ‘Don’t. I’ve seen enough blood lately.’ She was human.

  Human . . . and something of a whore.

  ‘How can you work for these . . . discontinuities?’

  ‘I owe them my survival. So do you.’

  ‘I hate them.’

  ‘They come to see me. They are, as you might imagine, troubled. An intolerable case load. I try my best. I listen to them, but I can’t give them what they want.’

  ‘They want—?’

  ‘Memories. Real memories, with a bite. They tell me of their lovers, friends, careers, obsessions, but it all happened to somebody else. Seaman Sparks wants me to teach him what music was like, good music – jazz, baroque, not the treacle they pump through the intercom. He would have played the flute. Then there’s Lieutenant Grass. He’s trying to recall his brother – fishing trips, touch football. It’s rare for relatives actually to find each other. Not enough time, too big a continent, and if they do connect the ages are usually wrong. Old women run across their pre-adolescent husbands. Newlyweds stumble into their middle-aged children.’

  ‘Are they always sad?’ George asked.

  ‘They have their flashes – moments you and I would call satisfaction, even joy. But most of the time, life is something they read about in a book. Yesterday Seaman Raskin said to me, “Imagine sittings in a gray, still, empty room, taking an endless true-or-false test, getting each question right, and realizing you’ll never experience anything else.” ’ She nicked her desk with the sacrificial knife. ‘Don’t ever confuse unadmittance with living, George.’

  ‘I still hate them. Anybody would have signed that sales contract.’

  ‘Let me guess. You’re feeling . . . betrayed? Framed? Manipulated?’

  ‘All those things.’

  ‘Manipulated by your therapist? By the darkbloods?’

  ‘Both. You never cared about me.’

  ‘Don’t say what you know isn’t true.’

  ‘You just wanted to patch me together so I’d be fit to stand trial.’

  With the sacrificial knife she began flipping back pages of Scarlet Passions. ‘Give me your Leonardo.’

  ‘What makes you think I have it?’

  ‘Give it to me.’

  He pulled the painting from his shirt. She received it respectfully, holding it by the edges.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of this.’ Morning touched her unconceived daughter’s hair. ‘But I like what it shows. I like everything about it. Your hand is almost on my breast.’

  She’s starting to get it right, he thought. Love. Marriage. Sex. Children. Species regeneration. ‘I must find a city with marble walls. They cure infertility there.’

  ‘It could be a hoax, of course,’ she said. ‘Nadine Covington’s bid for revenge.’

  ‘I believe the painting. So do you.’ Love. Marriage. Sex. But not necessarily in that order. ‘Tonight we’ll have a drink together in the Silver Dollar Casino.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If we’re going to marry and raise a family, we should get to know each other.’

  ‘I cannot have a drink with you.’ She returned the Leonardo. ‘The darkbloods are here, George. They have gained the continent. Do you truly understand your situation? If the judges find against you, nothing we want – a wedding, Aubrey, her siblings – none of it will happen.’ Leaning toward him, she spoke in a frantic whisper. ‘From now on, we must never be seen together. We can’t let anyone claim that I lack objectivity. “Dr Valcourt? Oh, she’s his ex-therapist, nothing more.” I’m coming to your trial, friend. Morning Valcourt, witness for the defense. I know something that will help your case.’

  ‘I won’t just walk away from you. I won’t.’

  Her conspiratorial voice dropped even lower. ‘You will. Until the hour of my testimony, I’ll be gone from your life. Do you understand? Gone. Searching for me will prove futile. No one can master the back passageways here, the dead ends.’

  ‘What do you know that will help my case?’

  ‘I know that I care deeply about you.’

  They parted not by kissing, not by hugging, but by discreetly brushing their fingertips together. For George it was one of the most fleshly and impassioned experiences of his life. The sensation lingered in his hands. The pleasure stayed in his memory, waiting to be called up whenever
he wanted to feel it.

  Captain Sverre was right. A year is nothing. So far, at age thirty-five, George had known twelve thousand days full of physical sensations, many of them astonishingly wonderful – drinking coffee, reading to his daughter, touching fingertips with Morning Valcourt. But a year is nothing. No wonder the unadmitted wanted to hang him.

  The Erebus Poker Club did not accomplish much poker that weekend. Brat kept forgetting what beat a straight. Whenever it was Wengernook’s deal, he couldn’t remember which cards should go up and which down. Overwhite got the chips confused, insisting that he was betting five dollars when he was really betting one.

  ‘These damn zombies,’ said Brat. ‘They just don’t seem real to me, know what I mean? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this whole business was being cooked up in Moscow.’ Not a single aspect of the general – posture, visage, tone of voice – suggested that he believed himself. The unadmitted were here. They had gained the continent. They were as real as South African granite.

  ‘Provided that the conservation of electric charge and the balance between particles and antiparticles are obeyed,’ said Randstable, ‘there is nothing to stop a lot of molecules, even organic molecules, from materializing and then combining into lifeforms . . . er, assuming that the discrepancy is never noticed, of course.’

  ‘And if the discrepancy is noticed?’ asked Wengernook.

  ‘The molecules disappear, naturally,’ said Randstable.

  ‘But we did notice,’ said Brat. ‘And the zombies are still around.’

  ‘That’s got me stumped too,” ’ said Randstable.

  ‘Know what I think, William?’ said Wengernook. ‘I think you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’

  ‘I wonder if we’ll get a fair trial,’ said George.

  ‘I wonder if wishes are horses,’ said Brat. He tried to shuffle, made a mess of it. ‘Believe me, fellas, the whole thing is a sham, like those show trials of Stalin’s. Our best chance would be a prison break.’

  ‘My father was a lawyer,’ said Wengernook. ‘All those counts against us – it’s what you call a retroactive indictment. We didn’t violate any laws, so they had to go out and invent some, ex post facto. If Bonenfant knows his stuff, he’ll get the case dismissed for lack of precedents.’

 

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