‘Paxton just ate a mushroom,’ said Sverre, squinting into Periscope Number One.
‘Why?’ asked Morning.
‘To cure his sterility,’ said Sverre. ‘State of the art medicine, circa 2015.’
‘He’s been wanting a family.’
‘If there’s justice in this world, he’ll get a noose.’
‘I believe he’s innocent.’
‘You love him, don’t you?’
‘No.’ She nudged Sverre away from the eyepiece and focused on her beloved.
He was crossing the plaza, Brat on one side, the MAD Hatter on the other. They cut through the spastic parade and approached the river, its dark surface swept by moonbeams and wisps of fog.
‘I seem to recall that sex was something quite special,’ said Sverre. ‘Had I lived, I would have been a devotee of sex.’
‘Sex was something quite special,’ Morning confirmed. How perfect George looked as he moved down the concrete steps and jumped onto the Hatter’s barge – how right was the sweat on his brow, how correct the cords of his muscles.
Sverre noted her wistful smile. ‘What is it like, Dr Valcourt?’
‘It?’
‘Having red blood. Living.’
‘Ambiguous.’
The captain pointed to the long black scab on his forearm. ‘Then it is in every way better than unadmittance.’
Removing his stovepipe hat, he blew on the fur and watched it tremble. A memory dragged itself forward like a dying animal. He clutched at it. Intimations of mortality. A blur. Something to do with love. Love for a parent? A child? Sharper now. A wife. He would have been married. Christine? No, Kristin… Kristin who? He couldn’t recall her last name. Kristin the pretty ensign. She would have been crazy about amusement parks. He saw her on a merry-go-round. Kristin, lovely Kristin, astride a wooden horse, going merrily around, singing, laughing.
Dissolving…
He reached out with his spindly fingers, stroked Morning’s cheek. ‘You are a woman of great passion. I felt that when I hired you.’ A tear formed in his right eye, a drop of gin in his left, and he pulled away. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t call you to my bed. I am more honorable than that.’
And less potent, he thought.
The bottle had wrecked him. His Number One Periscope did not go up.
‘You must understand – Paxton is my patient,’ said Morning, tightening her grip on the scope handle. ‘I cured him. Naturally I want him to have ambitions.’
Pacing furiously around the room, Sverre attempted to coax additional Kristin images out of his brain – a fruitless enterprise, as he knew it would be – then returned to Morning and asked, ‘Where are they now?’
‘On a barge,’ she reported. ‘They’re collecting war dead. The Hatter is frustrated. He wants all of history in his parade, and he’s afraid that it will always be…’
‘Incomplete!’ wailed the Hatter. ‘Lord knows I try, but there’s a limit to what one man can do.’
The fugitives crouched in the stem and surveyed the night’s catch. Theophilus had made them fishers of men; under the influence of George’s muscled arms, four corpses had risen from the river. Droplets speckled their brine-cured flesh. Grave robbing, George realized – whether the violated medium was earth or water – was a damning, unholy enterprise, blasphemous even by Unitarian standards.
‘A fine haul, no doubt about it,’ said the Hatter, misreading George’s dazed look. ‘Still, we have a long way to go.’
According to Theophilus, they had retrieved a former patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a gladiator whose highly entertaining death had occurred in 56 BC, a clerk employed by the Bank of Amsterdam from 1610 to 1629, and a Viking.
A resurrected galley slave poled the barge forward. Blind marble houses glided by. Bridges passed overhead, dark arching shapes that put George in mind of his vulture.
‘Do you realize I don’t have a single subject of the Pharaoh Akhnaton? Not one.’ Bubbles of sweat dotted the Hatter’s forehead. ‘The Arabian Caliphate and Abu Bakr? Nobody. The Gupta Court of fourth-century India? Zero!’ Lunging forward, he grabbed George’s shirt, bunching the material in his fists. ‘And victims? Don’t remind me! There’s a severe victim shortage in this city, I can tell you. Yes, I’ve got Napoleon covered, and the Trojan War, but what about the Young Turk Revolution of 1908? The Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842? The Crusades, for Christ’s sake! Don’t even talk to me about the Crusades!’
The Hatter took the tiller and steered them toward a concrete pier. The moonstruck water threw bright, dancing sine waves on the steps leading up to the street.
‘This is where you get off,’ he announced as the galley slave moored the barge.
‘You promised to take me to the mainland!’ Brat protested.
A fearsome drumming echoed through the marble city, as if a rain made of shrapnel and bones were felling on its streets.
‘I lied,’ said the Hatter.
‘You what?’ screamed Brat.
‘Something wrong with your hearing, General? I’ve got a root back at the shop that cures deafness. I lied. Folks around here don’t like the idea of your war crimes going unpunished. They’re coming, gentlemen. I wouldn’t want to guess what they’ll do when they arrive, but it’s certain to include tearing you limb from limb. You’ll wish you’d taken your chances with the court.’
‘I was going to take my chances with the court!’ said George. The drumming grew louder. Footfalls, he concluded – the clogs, galoshes, pumps, sandals, and buskins of Professor Carter’s citizens. ‘I’m innocent!’
‘Innocent, eh? Then why is the world over?’
‘You gave me spermatids, and now you’re going to have me killed?’ asked George.
Theophilus jumped onto the pier. ‘It’s the post-exchange environment. Nobody behaves rationally any more.’
As the mob rumbled forward, Brat drew Holly’s pistol and aimed it at the Hatter’s chest. ‘Call off your dogs, Carter! Call them off, or I’ll shoot!’
‘There’s a logic to what you’re saying,’ said Theophilus, ‘but, being insane, I cannot grasp it.’
Whereupon George, out of motives he would never fully comprehend, snatched the pistol from Brat and hurled it toward the front of the barge. The weapon glanced off the gladiator’s head, plopping into the dark gray river and vanishing instantly.
‘What’s happening?’ Morning asked.
‘Your lover just saved the Hatter’s life,’ Sverre replied, leaning away from the eyepiece. ‘Oh, and something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re in a lot of trouble with history.’
Up and down the crippled, dawn-lit avenues the bewildered defendants ran, Theophilus’s citizens in frantic pursuit, a booming cloud of invalidated peasants, princes, beggars, scholars, scientists, farmers, clerics, and soldiers. Every time George looked back, he noticed a different category of pre-nuclear weapon. The macabre rattle of spears, swords, muskets, and battle axes filled his ears, mixing with the mob’s computer-generated howls. These things are just puppets, he reminded himself – they cannot harm me. He could understand the post-exchange environment being horrible and depressing, but did it also have to be ludicrous?
As the defendants reached the main gate, a fat citizen with teeth like barbed wire popped out of a turret and, ever beholden to the Z-1000, cried, ‘I am not garbage!’
Stomping mushrooms under their boots, George and Brat ran beyond the walls, through the ravine, across the field of megaliths. Marsh gases hit them like a fist. Spears flew past. As the defendants charged into the muck, tiny fireballs began choking the sky. George glanced over his shoulder. The citizens had deployed a weapon of singular malevolence. Puppets, he recited again. Puppets, they’re just puppets. The flaming arrows fell everywhere, hissing against the silt, setting the dead grass on fire. The air thickened with a smell akin to unadmitted blood. A brawny officer from Genghis Khan’s army, dressed in what looked like the plating of some particularly vile and stupid dinosaur, sent a fireball sizzling over George’s scalp.