The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 102

My Grandfather

I HAVE read over my account of my self-election and see that it wants clarity. It was not that as a despot with a tangible goal—my grandfather—I was without doubts. Mother might be able to change shape; however, there was no magic on earth, or in Longfaeroe’s Heaven, or in the halls of the Norse gods, that could sweep my mind of worry. Like that American revolutionary Lazarus told me about, I was filled with unutterable anxiety. And so I kept it that way, unspoken, to myself. From then on, I concealed my lapses in confidence, my quixotic ambivalences. As the Norse would say, I guarded my word-hoard.

This was not the same as imperial aloofness. It was that I strove to lead as if I did not waver. It was not an inhuman policy, instead most human. It is human nature, as I have witnessed it, that a people much in distress—I mean life-threatening panic, at elemental extremes—not only will follow a relentless, keen, bold, and, yes, cruel man, but also will demand that this man rule them absolutely, increasingly as if he were God’s prophet. The Presbyterianism that Longfaeroe preached, and that the South Georgians followed unquestioningly, interpreted the practice of this sort of despotism as if it were ordained before time; they called it predestination. This is not a reasonable theory, contains elements that must be regarded as defeatism. Yet, though it indicates a mind nearly overwhelmed by chaos, it also can be seen as a try for order. It is folly and it is bravery; such a contradiction always means high risk.

My experiment in despotism contained risk for me as well, for it is also my experience that a people in final peril will try to take control of their leader, not with sedition and insurrection, rather with feelings more insidious—by obliging their leader to assert a system of government that is plain tyranny. This exchange, of inexcusable cruelty by one man for obedience to a single-minded absolutism by the mass, becomes a dynamo of flesh. All else seems to flow with it and to fuel it. It is a false system of government—Israel had taught me that, and Lazarus had been quick to remind me—for it has within it the terms of its own failure: Man is not God, cannot know God’s plan; Prophecy is a fleeting pridefulness; Freedom surrendered is reason scorned. But while it works, or seems to, it is a wonder, to be celebrated as it celebrates the will of man to overcome the violence of nature. When it stops working, it is impossible to separate man’s brutality from man. It becomes then what it always was, no poetic image of a dynamo of flesh, rather a degradation of civilization, a blasphemy, a deceitful bargain with darkness.

I overstate the case, and I apologize, a result of my runecarving, too quick to pretty words, too slow to philosophize rigorously. I see now my purpose. I am looking for an explanation of my grandfather, even as I was then directing King James and Candlemas Packet in a search for Grandfather. He was the man I was becoming. I knew that vaguely then, know it completely now. He was no modest Presbyterian determinist. He was a vengeful, scornful, autonomous man of an ineffable Lord God. It was my belief then that there was a solution to my plight. I did not know what it was. However, I did believe that finding Grandfather, perhaps just the effort to find Grandfather, would provide me revelation toward my end of solving the fate of me and mine. In my mind, in my word-hoard, Grandfather was enormous and mysterious and potent; he provided me with the closest analogy I possessed for the most awesome image in the Fiddle Bible, that of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

Was my quest a search for justification, then, or was it a flight for release? Is it necessary to choose between redemption or escape? I still am not sure. It was why I did what I did. Measuring my life on King James’s quarterdeck, I saw that since losing Black Crane, I had been pitiable, wandering, selfish, pointless, contrary. The bad turn of being trapped with the Volunteers in Port Stanley, the good turn of being adopted by the Frazers, the bad turn of being damned by the Hospidar, the good turn of learning Germanicus’s discovery on Mead’s Kiss, all these inexplicable accidents, all of this luck, good and bad, all moved me toward a summary desire. I told the albatross it was my heart’s desire. Grandfather was that and more. He was my treasure. Beowulf, King of the Weather-Geats, slayer of Grendel and mother, finally slain as he slew the unnamed dragon guarding another sort of treasure, he would have understood my face. Grim Fiddle did not feel destitute, damned, or lost as long as it w-as possible his grandfather might be found.

I did not tell those on board King James that Grandfather was the only reason we were making into the wind, with difficulty, veering into the horse latitudes to approach the Falklands from the north-northeast. I let them presume I had a plan for resettlement on West Falkland. Toro Zulema thought that the Falklands must be ripe for colonization after six years of Pattie misrule; HalfRed Harrah and the sealers harbored a need for revenge on the Hospidar, boasted they would sail anywhere in the Southern Ocean to establish a base for an invasion of South Georgia; Jane and Violante and Annabel Donne nurtured the women with tales of a new start at Port Stanley. I overheard them and remained removed. I did not think that Germanicus was fooled by my silence; he knew of Grandfather’s marker, appeared ashamed for his deception of me, was willing to leave my will unchallenged. I had followed his father to the end. Germanicus owed me as