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.’