‘Have you anything to say?’ Ramos called.
‘I say that I am inno—’
The executioner cinched the noose. It bit into the general’s throat, bringing blood. In a gesture at once dignified, insouciant, and vain, Brat refused the hood.
The Death-Cat lurched away, but the general had an iron neck, it would not snap. Briefly he danced amid the squalls of snow, grew tired, stopped. When the physician came forward, Brat planted a hard, icy boot in his face. Immediately Ramos took charge, ordering ten guards to line up. The MARCH Hare smiled crookedly as the rifles were raised. The order came. Bright red blood fountained forth, thick admitted juice rushing down the pristine front of Brat’s suit, speckling the ice, and then it was over, a soldier’s death after all.
Sverre drank gin, studied the white Cat. Under these circumstances, could Paxton possibly be thinking of sex? Had he and Dr Valcourt managed to make love before their separation? The captain pivoted the scope, fixed on where the future had taken its revenge, five trees fruited with convicted war criminals, the sixth tree empty, waiting.
George’s mind was slipping away from him.
Autistically he watched the progress of the ice clock, drops falling noisily to their destination, each as sad and final as a tear. Bang, bang went the drops, and barely an hour remained.
Then half an hour. Twenty minutes. Ten.
On the City of New York, Sverre entered the periscope room and scanned the continent in search of Lieutenant Grass’s orchard.
Bang, bang went the drops.
George looked up. A great red stain bloomed above his head. His ceiling was bleeding. The stain grew rapidly, extending its wet peninsulas.
He guessed that he was seeing the last unexpected effect of nuclear war.
A dark shape attacked the bloody ceiling from above. A fissure appeared, then a river system of cracks. Bits of ceiling fell inward, striking George’s shoulders and chest, panicking his spermatids.
The shape bartered relentlessly, until at last the ceiling split with a sound like a despairing frog. A million ice pellets burst into the cell; red droplets spattered downward, a bloodstorm. The wind entered in raw, razoring gusts, howling like an unadmitted child.
Why the Antarctic Corps of Guards did not simply come through the door was a puzzle George felt no inclination to solve. He picked up the family portrait, zipped it into the hip pocket of his scopas suit. Brat is planning to die with his manportable thermonuclear device at his side, he thought, and I shall die with my Leonardo.
A gigantic vulture of a type once thought extinct descended through the breach and landed on the floor.
So, thought George, they’ve changed the mode of my execution. I’m not to be hanged but devoured. Probably quicker, actually.
The teratorn screeched. Blood spilled from its beak like soup slopping out of a tureen. Its ratty feathers were inlaid with jewels of ice.
When George noticed a scopas-suited human astride the vulture’s neck, he realized that something other than an execution was in the making.
‘Climb aboard,’ called the rider, removing her helmet and releasing a burst of red hair. ‘I still believe you’re innocent,’ said Morning Valcourt. She tossed George a pair of goggles and a parka, its hood rimmed with wolverine fur.
‘You’ve tamed it?’ asked George. ‘God!’
‘Psychology 101 – Operant Conditioning. It’s usually done on pigeons, but it also works with teratorns.’
As Morning replaced her helmet, footfalls echoed through the tunnels outside the cell. George heard curses.
Grabbing successive fistfuls of feathers and pulling himself upward, he ascended the vulture’s left wing. The bird stank. It regarded him with an eye resembling a volcanic cinder. He straddled its scrawny neck, threw his arms around Morning’s waist.
‘There was blood on the ceiling,’ he said.
‘A dead seal, so our friend would cut through the roof. The feeding frenzy, right? Hold tight!’
The door flew open, mashing into the cell wall. George looked down. The guard held a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other. A scar ran like a black wadi all the way from his forehead to his mouth, which at the moment gaped in astonishment.
The vulture beat its wings, and the fugitives rose toward the lightless dawn.
Guards scurried across the courtyard, their lanterns and torches darting about like crazed fireflies. Gun metal flashed. Rifleshots ripped through the dark, shattering the teratorn’s tail, so that great severed feathers drifted toward the ground. A slug drilled through George’s boot heel, another clipped the fur on his parka. The vulture screeched, shook, but stayed aloft. The volley was answered by dozens of shadowy, armed protestors streaming through the gate. FREE PAXTON, their banners said. NO SYMBOLIC EXECUTIONS. The protestors cheered as the fugitives ascended beyond the skirmish. Shots, bright bullets – bodies hit the ice, black blood erupting from their scopas suits, their screams mingling with the vulture’s cries. Oh, valuable bird, thought George, carnivorous angel, braver than an eagle, more perfect than a horse, Leonardo need not have feared you. With a great heave of its rudderless body, the teratorn cleared the Ice Palace ramparts. Soaring over a tower, it stretched its legs, opened its talons, and turned the Antarctic national flag into a dozen fluttering ribbons.
She’s made good on her scheme, Captain Sverre concluded when Juan Ramos failed to return to the white Cat. He smiled, pleased that his final voyage had not been made in the service of the McMurdo Agreement’s framers and their show trial. Pivoting the periscope, he watched a search party swarm across the Nimrod Glacier; their lanterns bobbed among the hummocks like wills-o’-the-wisp. He looked toward the plateau, focused on a black and menacing shape cutting across the southern constellations. A Soviet Spitball cruise missile? No – a teratorn. For unto them a species will be born. Fly, George. Fly, Morning…
‘Fly, Teratornis!’ George screamed.
Although he had ample cause to feel that his escape was a mirage, the wish-dream of a man confronting doom, the plausible discomforts of the flight told George that all was real. Bird riding was far less romantic than he would have guessed. Teratorns, it seemed, were flying ecosystems, their feathers clogged with parasites – worms, bugs – and the parasites of parasites. The wind lashed George’s face; it bored under his skin and made icy tunnels in his bones. The bird’s cervical vertebrae defied the padding of his suit, cutting into his thighs. The oozy odor of vulture sweat, death left in the sun, blew into his nostrils. Yes, this was truly happening.
‘Where are we going?’ he called above the hysterical wind, certain that at any moment he was going to fall off.
‘Across the Pole – to the boat!’ Morning called back.
The Pole! His gonads buzzed. In one of his seminiferous tubules, an Aubrey Paxton spermatid lay waiting to be steered into its appropriate duct. He could feel it.
‘The boat?’
‘She’s been at sea! Sverre brought her back into the Pacific, round the Getz Shelf and—’
Her words were claimed by the gale.
They were free! They could take the submarine, sail it into the timefolds, find places where flowers bloomed and rolling hills again wore lush mantles of grass. Free… Inevitably, inexorably, the psychic museum flashed through George’s brain. He saw Morning at the moment of giving birth, saw the infant’s soggy cord, its unexpectedly bountiful hair, its little hand, an arabesque of wrinkles.
Morning pounded on the vulture’s neck. It swung its beak away from the Endurance Cliffs and toward the crest of the glacier, beyond which lay the Queen Alexandra Mountain Range and, further still, the massive polar plateau, land of ten thousand ice limbos, uncountable hummocks, and that sad, forsaken point from which the traveler has nowhere to go but north.