She ran through the maze of ice-and-steel tunnels, following the flashlight beam, chasing his crackling footfalls and the shouts that rattled off the frozen surfaces of New Amundsen-Scott Station – howls of unfathomable sadness, curses targeted against God, and, most of all, over and over, a thousand echoing demands that the universe give him a child.
The sickness began in his spleen. Sverre could feel it corrupting the fat organ, rushing outward, pouring into his lymph, pressing toward the headwaters of his heart. He lay in his bunk for hours, days, powerless to stop the progress of his unadmittance, his mind wandering the foggy border between sleep and oblivion. His brain floated on dark, tarry fluids. Occasionally it showed him snatches of his beloved Kristin, more often an Antarctic crevasse, an ice tunnel to hell.
It was all in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. Sverre had been the first of his race to gain the continent, and so he would be the first to lose it. Ragnarok, he thought. World’s End. He was satisfied with his new verse. It did not rhyme; poetry need not rhyme. Yea, Thor struck Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent as it shot from the sea, and the worm’s last breath did blast the god and dry his blood, and next the mortal world itself did crack, locked in endless winter. Ragnarok – when all debts fall due, all legends climax. And so, pursuant to the legend, an Antarctic storm rushed through the boat, sea dragon’s breath prying back the hatches, whooshing down the corridors, crossing Sverre’s cabin. He drew his blankets tight, but the dragon’s breath still came; it squeezed his bones and turned his gutta-percha eye into a hailstone. His ears throbbed with the detonations of Jormungandr’s heart.
He awoke. The heart was a human fist, pounding at his cabin door.
Rolling out of bed, he was hit by the smell of himself, flesh marinated in alcohol and sweat. Gin, he knew, and gin alone, would get him to the door. He limped to his writing desk, found the bottle, shoved its mouth home. His intoxicated hand staggered across the desk, knocking over the ink pot, scattering pages of the Saga of Thor.
Behind the door two ghosts in scopas suits waited. They were rimmed with frost. One had an ice storm raging in its beard.
‘You’re out of uniform,’ Morning said, removing her helmet.
‘Dr Valcourt?’ He took a pull at the bottle.
‘From the Pole to Astrid Land by vulture in fifty-one hours,’ she said. ‘That must be a record, right? They’ll put us in National Geographic.’
‘Morning and I are in love,’ said George.
‘I know,’ said the captain.
Sverre walked forward, tripped. George bear-hugged him, and the gin bottle clattered to the floor. It was shocking how insubstantial the captain had become, his skin like paper, his beard the color and consistency of dead seaweed. The fugitives carried him to the bed, lowered him into the Sverre-shaped mold in his mattress. He asked for his poem and some gin. While Morning gathered up the papers from the writing desk, George retrieved the bottle.
‘I saw the executions,’ Sverre said. ‘Tarmac refused the hood. A real four-ball general…’ He coughed. ‘I would like to hear the Saga of Thor.’
Morning read the captain his poem.
‘That’s not bad, is it?’ said Sverre.
‘You would have been one heck of an epitaph writer,’ answered George.
‘Be honest now – is it any good?’
‘In your time you became a poet,’ Morning replied.
George lifted the white raven from Sverre’s writing desk, smoothed its alabaster feathers. Holly would have named it Birdie. ‘Sir, you’ve made certain efforts on my behalf,’ he said stiffly, ‘and I appreciate them.’
‘Your name should never have been in the indictment, Paxton.’ Sverre grinned, showing teeth that resembled Indian corn. ‘Be fruitful and multiply – both of you.’
Morning fired an unambiguous glance toward George: leave him his illusions. ‘My dear Lieutenant Commander Sverre,’ she said, ‘may I assume that you never mustered yourself out of the Navy? Are you still captain of the City of New York?’
The dying man could not stand, and so he sat on the altar, boots dangling against the silk antependium. At one time his voice could have filled the whole chapel, rocking it as would a hellfire sermon from Reverend Sparrow, but now the engaged couple had to lean forward to catch his words.
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of… whatever.’ A cough attacked, spinning him around. He flailed at the air, smacked his hand against a candlestick, sent it toppling. ‘Something, something. To join together this man and this woman in… something. Holy matrimony. Consecrated fornication. Something.’
He took the gin bottle from his coat and drank.
‘Do you, Morning Valcourt, take this man to be your lawfully wedded wife… husband… to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse… something… for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish… all that… till death do you part?’
‘I do.’
He coughed, and black blood came up.
‘And do you, George Paxton, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, come locusts… gammas rays… come… never mind. Do you?’
‘I do.’
‘Forasmuch as you have consented together in wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and the captain of this ship, I now pronounce you husband and wife.’
Husband and wife kissed. Their scopas suits came together, separating a few seconds later with a loud, rubbery skluck.
When Sverre smiled, black blood spilled over his teeth. ‘Tell your children to respect the Navy.’ He collapsed on the altar, muttered, ‘Look – she’s never been clearer. Look at Kristin, would you, flying up and down on that roller coaster, up and down, so… clear…’
They laid him out, opened his claw-hammer coat. Like an abused onion Sverre lost his layers, skin, muscle, viscera, veins, nerves, all sloughing from his bones, and then there was dust, and then there was nothing, nothing at all save a solitary gutta-percha eye.
The newlyweds gathered Sverre’s vacant coat into a bundle, brought it on deck, tossed it over the side. An ice floe slapped against the coat, pounding it into the depths of the bay. A flock of penguins watched from their rookeries. Dressed in their finest tuxedos, they had come for a wedding, only to find it superseded by a funeral. They stood dutifully on the cliffs, solemn as professional mourners, until the vulture came and, with fearsome squawks and a tumultuous beating of its wings, chased them away. It was the last George ever saw of the great unextinct beast, his feathered co-defendant, freak, fluke, ender of the world. Exhausted, famished – they had not known deep sleep or a true meal in two days – husband and wife returned to their bower. They went to the galley, a wonderland of kettles, and prepared their wedding feast, eating it on the spot. Apples and pears disappeared into ravenous mouths. Turkey drumsticks were consumed half raw. Corn went down frozen. They devoured their wedding cake in batter form.
Staggering into the corridor, the happy couple realized that they were over a hundred yards from any cabin. They looked at each other. A hundred yards, a hundred miles – no difference. They dropped to the floor and nuzzled. Like a lizard abandoning its skin, George slipped out of his scopas suit. He heard a grinding noise – snores, yes, but these were the snores of Morning Valcourt, hence, pleasing snores, subtle, intelligent. Quietly he studied his new wife, this great unadmitted psychotherapist, this brilliant vulture pilot, gleaning endless delight from her freckled, ice-scarred, beautiful, sleeping face…