The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 114

need, such as children or disabled. The Little Brothers cheated, could be bribed. The quaking was incessant, with occasional cave-ins, yet that was not worse than those huge seas. After the first two months, my people had adapted ably, had mixed with the internees guilefully. The other wretches thought Golgotha more than a shelter; they held it dear, like a miracle. They were victims of untold wars, catastrophes, outrages, had sunk to complete destitution. Lazarus, tattered and sharp-eyed, regarded them shrewdly, at first seemed to proselytize among their leaders in Spanish and Portuguese. He was actually propagandizing, and not for what I supposed, a more subtle strategy. His health had returned to him—though not his equanimity, which none of us would ever find again—and with it a purpose as sure as the wind. I watched him come and go, a shadowy missionary in shadowy halls, and waited for an explanation, which came late summer.

“This is paradise for the beggars. They lay down and whimper like whipped beasts,” he said, waving his hands in the direction of the corridor that led from our barracks to the axis of the camp. By then, we had bargained for the best available—the greatest good for the least number—and dispensed from our largesse for our own gain and for no other reason, assuredly not for decency.

I was in a low mood. It might have had to do with some rationing problems, but then, I was ever in bad temper at Golgotha. I looked at Lazarus and said as rudely as possible, “I should think this a fit place for your Plato.”

“You mock me. You have changed. I have changed. For cause—time is a thing. It does bite, like the cold. Listen carefully. There is no need to panic here. We have a postrevolutionary society. We are caught in the stage between anarchy and tyranny. The Brothers are Mensheviks, not bad, whimpering fools, blind and dumb. They cooperate ignorantly with our antisocialist hooligans, Mosquite and his lot, and the imperialists, the Ice Cross. Would you understand me if I said that our call is to assume the idiom of the Bolsheviks? In France, it was the Directory that had to be crushed by Bonaparte.”

‘You are babbling. Don’t give me any history lessons,” I said.

“I suppose not,” continued Lazarus, black eyes focused again on something very distant, suggestively supernatural. “You do see that Silva and the Brothers think they have established a society of the Sermon on the Mount? The Brothers look to mysticism, to the afterlife in their Heaven, for proof of their conduct. They tell the beggars to wrait for Jesus, and they do, simpleminded millenarianists. See it, Grim, crumbs of bread and oceans of promises. There are elements of dissent. The conditions overwhelm. There are the Hielistos. I wonder if they have government—probably more tribal confederacy. These are the worst of man, subradonal. Beasts, Grim, whipped and whipped. I wonder if the Ice Cross knows there is a point, a discernible moment, when you can’t whip a beast any longer. He attacks, instinct to survive gone. That beast needs a master who loves him, frightens him, can use him.”

I told Lazarus to stop condescending to me. He seemed to me almost hallucinatory—rambling, moving his hands in the air. That was a sign of hypothermia. I should have comforted him, did not. He was pitiless, I returned the same. I told him that I did not require his high learning to know that Golgotha was possible because all those fine republics of his had become mobs without consciences, let alone justice.

“Justice is what one argues it to be,” he said. I relaxed. Lazarus was hysterical. He continued, “The law is human. It has limits and needs continual amendment. I know you, Grim Fiddle. You have absorbed that antirationalism preached by Mord Fiddle. Lutherans! You and your grandfather! Fantastic architects, dividing what is into the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Earth, and then applying your double truths, man’s law and God’s law. You Lutherans continue the worst excesses of the Roman church you rejected. You turn your face from the Age of Reason that you helped birth. You do believe that reason is, what, ‘the Devil’s whore’? And your heroic stubbornness, your delirious pigheadedness, leads you to denounce law because it is not infallible, because it can be broken by the men who made it. You crave absolute certainty. Not finding it, you declare yourselves absolute judges. And how do you rationalize—excuse the word—justify your crudity and mistakes and crimes? You reach for the so-called mystery of divine forgiveness of sins, like some alchemist’s trick. Whoosh! The just man is redeemed! And the unjust man? Why, he has always been damned, from before time! And that faith of yours, unshakable, since you declare it is a faith in God Most High, Lord God Almighty, that is beyond demonstration. It is, in fact, faith in your own pigheadedness. You Lutherans are born tyrants. But useful ones, constrained miraculously by your sense of dignity. Not a king of kings, but a tyrant of tyrants. Not even the Gospels you Protestants make a fetish of will make you balk. Admit it! That is why you, Grim, cannot abide the Brothers. You denounce the Sermon on the Mount as inappropriate law for this world, as defeatist, because it gets between you and your idea of your great judge, Lord God. Denounce, and condemn, and decry, and pound, that is your nature. And underneath that martial piety, still the Viking, slashing at civilization because it is not certain enough for you. And if I come to you to ask for a government, a system to preserve justice without need of a tyrant, you sulk, or accuse, or bully. What would you have for us weak children? What would you not scowl at? What is enough for you, Grim?”

“Not this place, and not your republicanism. Lies,” I said. “Grim, Grim, my virtuous brother Grim,” he said, his voice hoarse from