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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In Which Our Hero and His Mate Visit a Garden of Ice and One of Earthly Delights

By nightfall the fugitives were at the Pole, a stretch of open plateau seamed against the dark sky and heaving with waves of frozen snow. Vents and antennas poked through the sasgruti, evidence of the submerged outpost known as New Amundsen-Scott Station. They hitched their teratorn to a chimney.

Someone had left a mirror ball – the type intended to decorate a garden – at the precise endpoint of the earth’s axis. George pressed it to his stomach. Was this how a pregnancy felt?

‘I shall regain my fertility here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got millions of spermatids now, but unless they are pulled into my epididymis, they will never mature.’

Morning’s shrug, her frown, the cant of her eyebrows – yes, there was certainly some skepticism in these gestures, but mainly, he felt, she was expressing curiosity. She wished him luck. Good, he thought, she’s keeping an open mind. We have no idea what wisdom the future would have brought, what breakthroughs in mushroom therapy and geomagnetic cures.

He hugged the mirror ball tighter. His lower body trembled. Am I committing the great Unitarian sin of self-delusion? No, something was definitely occurring in his gonads, a grand-scale spermatid migration. Tendrils of light rose from the ice, forming tiny diamond-like satellites that went into orbit around the mirror ball, a thousand sparkling moons following their own reflections. He sensed his spermatids’ happiness, the joy of children being chased by an incoming tide. Onward the seedlets marched, driven by the resilient, magnetic earth. They reached the epididymis. Here they would mature, learn to whip their fine, new tails. In time, as he recalled from the biology text he had read on the sub, they would be diluted by the great fluids of the seminal vesicles – what a technician God was! – then move on to new and exciting vistas: vas deferens, urethra, vagina, cervix, ovarian duct, uterine wall. While only one of his nascent spermatozoa was destined to sire his child, the others would do their part, bumping against the ovum with their protein-degrading enzymes – knock-knock-knock-knock – thus removing the troublesome outer layers.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Aubrey Paxton.

The little moons stopped in their orbits, ceased to exist, and he set the mirror ball back on the ice.

Morning had shot two skuas with the assault rifle from her scopas suit. One corpse protruded from her backpack. The other lay across the Teratornis’s beak, and then – snap, gulp – the meal was gone, not dead long enough to suit the vulture, perhaps, but it made no complaint.

‘I believe I’m cured,’ George said. Spermatids were frolicking in his epididymis, home free.

‘You are a man of formidable ambition,’ Morning replied.

They followed the spray of her flashlight down a sloping wooden ramp and into the heart of the station. Tunnels branched left and right from the central bore, thirty-foot trenches roofed by arching sections of corrugated steel. Turning, they found themselves amid a congestion of radio equipment and meteorological instruments. Here they plucked the skua and cooked it on the primus stove from her suit. It was gone in two minutes. Weary, numb, they pushed their cold lips together, kissed without feeling it, engaged in a bulky Antarctic hug. They slept.

Dawn came, dark, dismal.

‘I have hope,’ he said.

‘Lazarev is fourteen hundred miles away,’ she replied.

‘Hope for our family.’

Morning fired up the primus stove and began preparing coffee.

‘Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine bringing the whole human species back,’ he said. ‘All that intermarriage – it gets messy, the genes degenerate or something. Still,’ he smiled, ‘Adam and Eve brought it off.’

‘I thought you were a Unitarian.’

‘All right, maybe it will be the last family – but it will be. Life is not nothing. Sverre can show us how to run the boat. We’ll take her out of here, away from all this ice and justice. We’ll get to someplace warm.’

Morning poured coffee into her expressionless mouth. She harvested ice flecks from her hair.

‘I’d like to know what you think,’ he said.

‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘No.’

She placed her chilled hands over the primus flame, moved them as if they were on a spit. ‘I think…’

‘Yes?’

His fianceé was at the most precise and unambiguous place on earth, yet she looked lost. ‘I think that we must get to Lazarev before we get to the Garden of Eden.’

‘Yes, but after Lazarev, we can try to become pregnant, and then—’

‘Men don’t want children, George, men want strategic options. Didn’t you lean anything at the trial?’

‘I want children. A child. Our child.’

‘You want Justine and Holly back.’

‘I want you and—’

Morning hurled a fistful of skua bones against the hard snow wall, slicing off his sentence. ‘Can’t you figure anything out on your own? Must it all be explained to you? In two days we’ll be flying over Skeidshoven Mountain. Do you know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, idiot?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do.’

I do not know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, he told himself, over and over. His bullet wound had not hurt so much since its inception. I do not know…

He knew. Oh, God, he knew. Damn you, Nostradamus, prince of frauds! And damn you as well, Leonardo, painter of lies!

He pulled the magic lantern slide from his breast pocket. His supposed wife smiled up at him, his alleged daughter still wore a merry face. With a quick slapping motion he rammed the glass rectangle against the floor. There was a sound like a nut encountering a nutcracker. It’s not everyone who gets to destroy a priceless Leonardo, he thought. And then his tears started, large and cold, as if an ice clock were ticking in his brain.

Morning removed her gloves and picked up a Leonardo sliver. It contained Aubrey’s head.

‘What is Skeidshoven Mountain?’ George asked. He knew.

She rested the sliver against her palm. ‘It’s where I…’

‘Yes?’

‘Gained the continent.’

She drew the glass across her flesh. Black blood rushed out. Clotting, it acquired the tormented contours and pinched skin of a weeping face.

‘On the second of May,’ she said, ‘a bright winter afternoon. I beheld my memories, and I had nothing. No children, no lovers, just a working knowlege of psychotherapy.’

Squeezing her eyelids together, she bottled up her tears.

Even with the frequent pauses for gulps and sighs, her story did not take long. Stowing away as the submarine left McMurdo Station… pretending to come aboard with Randstable… going to Sverre and convincing him that his prisoners were threatened with sudden mental collapse…

‘I wanted a life, George, not the dead dreams of those wretches in the limbos.’ Her tears escaped, hardening into thin bright glaciers before they could leave her face. ‘And I did it. I brought it off. You would never have loved a darkblood, but you loved me.’

She opened her eyes. He was gone…

I don’t understand the first thing about admitteds, Morning thought. I love this man, and I have no idea what matters to him.