The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 123

were small camps administered by international treaty organizations, and several with ties to socialist blocs. Then there were the Roman Catholic Church’s camps, from the extremes of Father Saint Stephen to the Brothers of Perpetual Witness at Golgotha. It is instructive to suppose what one political philosophy might have linked such diverse sacrifice. I have already suggested my solution: the Charity Factor of the New Benthamites, generalized benevolence on a world scale to assure stability among the pleasured while doing little to comfort the dilemma of the pained. This explanation must fall short, of course, because it presumes that the ice camps were conceived with vision and maintained with precision.

The truth was the ice was an impartial executioner; there was no one in charge; the Ice Cross and religionists suffered with the wretched. The bulk of the work for the camps was done by convicts like the Little Brothers who had been transported to the South Shetlands. This permitted the Ice Cross no real assistance. Even the elite of the South Shetlands, Ice Cross officers like Dietjagger and Ariadne, were not exempt, were sad itinerants who had plunged themselves across Bifrost for money but no gain. The Ice Cross did a ruinous job, committed atrocities that should never be forgotten; however, it is also true that it never stopped struggling to the limit of its mandate for charity, until Grim Fiddle stopped it.

Consider the difficulty of establishing order on the ice: an international brigade of adventurers, renegades, and the not rare saintly man, provided with warships and the absolute power of life and death, let loose upon a sea of ice and refugees. Who can be surprised that the Ice Cross came to be mind-crippled? What the Ice Cross was asked to do was absurd. Nothing good could be done. The only release for the Ice Cross was betrayal, either of humanity or of themselves. This alone should explain why the best of the capitanes de los Hielistos were Ice Cross turncoats.

Consider the task assumed by the mandate of charity: uncountable multitudes worldwide scrambling for a place under the sun, some several hundred thousand of them crushed into the ice camps, who must be disarmed, sheltered, fed, nursed, and only then, if they survived the winter, the quakes, the hopelessness, relocated to lands already awash with refugees. The resettlement program did exist. It collapsed from abuse and contradiction, drowned by the flood of flesh. And even if it had worked as designed, where to put them? What utopia then? That is the answer in the question; no place. The promise of resettlement became a whip with which the Ice Cross controlled the camps. I have explained how I was at first persuaded by the hope of resetdement. For the less lucky the thought of a new land, a new Eden, justified any disgrace. Worse, the resettlement program was soon made into another kind of trap: many nations, especially republics in Africa and South America, used the false promise of resettlement to persuade unwanted populations to submit to roundups, deportation, and final imprisonment on the ice.

Nevertheless, I do not mean to portray the South Shetlands as if they were a chain of death camps. That would be wrong. Yes, the camps were a result of Brave New Benthamism or old and familiar totalitarianism, in all, the apologetics of the politics of falsehood. And yet, yes also, the camps did become the focus of a colossal relief effort, one that required genius and compassion to bridge Bifrost in order to get goods into the Antarctic. Modern Asgard—those grand republics—was neither deaf nor heartless. For every Odin, there were Thors and Balders, wellmeaning guardians of men, people capable of decency. They must have sacrificed a great deal in order to get that food to us. They must have sent up a roar that shook the pillars of Odin’s halls. No banquet could have been without a woe-singer reminding the gods of our depravity. There must have been heroes and heroines in every nation who deserved credit, not the persecution they likely suffered. And I can suppose their frustration, gathering funds, hiring transports and transporters, fending off competing chauvinists, reaching across Bifrost to save the ice camps, only to watch the situation at the edge of Midgard worsen, descend.

For there was one aspect of the South that no god, no hero, no machinery of shimmering Asgard could overcome. I could explain it glibly by rendering it with Israel’s cynical remark that the only difference between a man and a dog is that the dog will not bite the hand that feeds it. I shall not, because it pertains completely to my conduct on Anvers. I confess forthrightly.

The wretched in the South, we wretches, we were not all innocent victims of some fabulous conspiracy to disenfranchise lambs. It is this point that shows me that my fantastic model of twenty-first-century Asgard and Midgard has distorted the truth. For we wretches were the worst possible remnant. The genuine meek, the genuinely wronged, they had been left far behind, dead in their hovels, on the beaches, in the sea. We in the ice camps had come through our ordeals because we were tougher, wilder, cruder than our brethren. We were the lucky remnant. We were the most violent wretched: pirates, killers, thieves, madmen, lost to reason and utterly embittered. As we suffered atrocities, we were atrocious. We did have high dreams, but they had come to be twisted by hatred. Those of us who survived, we came to believe that only the most murderous could endure the ice camps. What was the face of our enemy? It was not only the mind-corrupt Odins, or the self-deceived Thors, or the miserable Ice Cross. The enemy was also the reflection in the ice. How to say this and convince in a blow? We did drink the blood. We did eat the dead.

I read over Grim Fiddle’s cosmology, and I perceive that I have overstated; in so doing, I