‘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.
ROBERT WENGERNOOK, BRIAN OVERWHITE, MAJOR GENERAL ROGER TARMAC, DR WILLIAM RANDSTABLE, REVEREND PETER SPARROW, GEORGE PAXTON, individually and as members of the following groups and organizations to which they respectively belonged, namely:
The United States Department of Defense, The United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, The United States Air Force, The Strategic Air Command, The National Security Council, Lumen Corporation, Sugar Brook National Laboratory, The Committee on the Incipient Evil.
THE UNADMITTED PEOPLES OF ANTARCTICA, by the undersigned Alexander Aquinas and staff, duly appointed to represent them in the investigation of the charges herein set forth, pursuant to the McMurdo Sound Agreement and the Charter of this Tribunal, DO ACCUSE THE ABOVE-NAMED DEFENDANTS of the following crimes.
Count One. Crimes Against Peace: planning and preparing for a war of aggression, whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of a defendant’s country of citizenship.
Count Two. War Crimes: deploying weapons explicitly designed for the wanton destruction of cities, for the slaughter of civilian populations, and for other violations of the laws and customs of war.
Count Three. Crimes Against Humanity: namely, biosphere mutilation, radiation poisoning, superfluous injury, unnecessary suffering, and other cruel and barbaric acts.
Count Four. Crimes Against the Future: namely, planning and preparing for a war of extinction against the human species.
‘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.