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George felt himself rising. He realized that he was standing, that Morning was studying him with moist eyes.

It’s positive, George! The pregnancy test was positive!

‘Mr George Paxton, the court finds you…’

Nothing to worry about, folks, every baby gets ear infections.

‘Innocent—’

Innocent!

‘…on Count One, Crimes Against Peace. Innocent on Count Two, War Crimes. Innocent on Count Three, Crimes Against Humanity.’

Aubrey, Morning, we’ve done it!

‘On Count Four, Crimes Against the Future, the court finds you guilty as charged and sentences you to be hanged at sunrise tomorrow.’ Justice Jefferson winced violently. ‘I am sorry, Mr Paxton. We rather liked you.’ Her gavel hit the bench for the last time. ‘The International Military and Civilian Tribunal is hereby dissolved.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In Which Orange Trees Sprout Nooses and Our Hero Is Reunited with His Vulture

Even if George had heard the aphorism that nothing concentrates one’s mind so wonderfully as knowing one will be hanged at dawn, his mind would still have been woefully unconcentrated. A tribunal stenographer transcribing his thoughts would have produced only babblings, yipes, and the same chant he had improvised when the warhead was groundburst upon his home town. This cannot be happening, this cannot be happening, this cannot

Like a cancer victim scanning a medical dictionary in hopes that the standard definitions have been repealed overnight in favor of good news, George reviewed what Justice Jefferson had said to him, seeking to find alternative meanings for ‘guilty’ and ‘hanged’ and ‘sunrise’ and ‘tomorrow.’ Futile. He picked up his Leonardo. His tears hit the paint, turning Aubrey’s dress to mud. I must face all this with dignity, he recited to himself. But where was the audience? In what history book would his courage be recorded? He returned the glass slide to the nightstand.

A discordant jangle of keys reached his ears, and then the door cracked open, sending a burst of torchlight across the cell floor.

‘Morning?’

But it was only Juan Ramos, bearing a large, hourglass-shaped object and a plate of food. ‘Your last meal, brave extinctionist. Also, if you want it, an ice clock.’

George’s last meal was a sumptuous pile of fried skua, boiled sea lion, and corn, the latter harvested ‘from the ice-free valleys near McMurdo Sound,’ as Ramos explained. There was even a small glass of wine – ‘fermented penguin lymph’ – and a fresh orange.

‘I would like some privacy,’ said George.

‘My fear is the utensils, Señor.’ Ramos set the ice clock next to Aubrey’s portrait. ‘You might try killing yourself, no?’

The profundity of George’s appetite embarrassed and confused him. Didn’t his body know what was going on here? He devoured every morsel, scraping the plate with his knife, licking the blade. His wine vanished in three gulps.

Ramos said, ‘The clock will tell you when dawn arrives. As we say, “It’s always darkest before the dawn in Antarctica, and it’s always darkest after that too.”’ He demonstrated the device. At the base, a small seal-oil lamp. In the top chamber, a block of ice. As the heat rose, the ice dissolved drop by drop into the lower chamber, which already contained a puddle.

‘The design comes from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks,’ the jailor explained. ‘Buenos noches,’ he added softly. He collected the utensils and left.

When the clock’s lower chamber was half full, so that barely ten thousand drops divided George from the scaffold, another visitor arrived, a person to whom he was certain he had nothing more to say.

The trial had aged Bonenfant, wrinkled him. It was as if his face had been painted on a balloon, and now the air was leaking out. ‘Justice has miscarried,’ he announced. Zags of white cut through his black hair. ‘No – worse. Justice has suffered a backalley abortion. We’ve made all the appropriate appeals, of course.’

‘Hopeless, right?’

‘I thought you’d get a fair trial, I really did. The judges simply couldn’t see that most nuclear wars don’t end this way. All that high-flying talk about impartiality, and they never once stopped being darkbloods. I’m sorry, George. My best wasn’t good enough.’

‘See this?’ George removed the glass painting from the nightstand, held it before Bonenfant. ‘An original Leonardo.’

‘Hmm?’ The advocate examined the slide from several different distances. ‘Impressive. So much detail in such a small space.’ His voice was redolent of rusty hinges. ‘Looks a bit like you and Dr Valcourt, doesn’t it? Leonardo, you said?’

‘Following orders from that famous liar and charlatan, Nostradamus.’

Bonenfant paced around the cell, a subtle limp in his gait, a minor stoop in his posture. ‘The tribunal wonders whether you have any final requests,’ he said.

George cast a weary eye on the ice clock. ‘I would like my family back, my planet restored, and my execution postponed fifty years.’

Bonenfant forced a laugh. When you are about to be hanged, George concluded, you get laughs for your jokes.

‘Tarmac asked for a soldier’s death.’ The advocate enacted a guard raising a rifle. ‘Firing squad.’

‘I’ve heard that your bowels let go when they hang you,’ said George.

‘Request denied.’

‘Poor bastard.’

‘But they did grant his other wish – he’ll be hanged with that man-portable thermonuclear device in his holster. Defused. He told Jefferson, “I still believe that armed missiles served the cause of world peace, and I would be a hypocrite to reject them in my hour of adversity.”’ Bonenfant pulled a sealed envelope from the hip pocket of his scopas suit. ‘This is for you.’

George tore off his gloves, clawed at the envelope with frozen fingernails. A scrap of paper fell out.

Dearest Darling,

Some things are too painful.

Human extinction.

Reunion with the man I love on the eve of his execution.

Do you hate me for not coming? I thought of the things we would try saying to each other, and it was unendurable. I shall not abandon you. I shall join you at the end. There is no justice. Forgive me.

All my love,
Morning

Bonenfant touched the ice clock, failed to staunch its flow. ‘You’re quite a celebrity, George – do you realize that? People are saying your case should never have come to trial. They know you’re being hanged for symbolic reasons. Cold comfort, I guess, but—’

‘I would like you to leave now.’

With more violence than he had ever brought to anything in his life, George shredded Morning’s letter.

‘Bad news?’

‘I said you should leave.’

‘I found a Presbyterian minister for Overwhite. I could try to get you a Unitarian.’

‘Mr Bonenfant, in ten seconds I am going to strangle you to death, and my sympathizers out there will realize that I am not so symbolic after all.’

George looked at the ice clock and saw that the lower chamber was two-thirds full. The slam of the cell door dislodged a particularly large and malicious drop.

Latitude: 70 degrees 0 minutes south.

Longitude: 11 degrees 50 minutes east.

Dawn.

Thrusting through the brash-ice that clogged the Princess Astrid Coast, Periscope Number One cast its eye on the frozen beach. The beholder of this panorama, Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre of the United States Navy, grinned expansively. The Astrid barrier was as deserted as he had guessed it would be. Not a single ice limbo rose from the sparkling silver cliffs. Home to the stations of Lazarev and Novolazarevskaya, Astrid had become like all other Soviet claims in Antarctica – an antimecca, unholy in the extreme, a land occasioning unspeakable profanities and pilgrimages of avoidance. A most reliable sanctuary, he decided.