The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 124
The truth was that the South was ever covered by a pervasive gloom, like the wafting fogs of the Antarctic convergence. I correct my excess in the same way one confronted that climate, by plunging into it. I shall set aside my mythology of the Antarctic for the moment and try to penetrate the lost history of the South with specificity. It too may fail to gain the whole. It is all I can do. It is my hope that somewhere between the universal above and what I know of the specific outrages below, there is the same revelation I once experienced—and some understanding of what we did there.
My hope also is that this, the last testament of my family, will convey my lasting fury for their murder. I have already told how King James came to the ice. Our exodus was late. I shall now return to the saga Grandfather related to me that fortnight he lay dying at Golgotha. I shall translate as best I can Mord Fiddle’s cosmology. It would be contrary, however, if I were to narrate only Mord Fiddle’s story, and so I shall weave in what I know now of the genesis of the ice camps and of the travail of my family. Grandfather’s story spanned the seven years he waited and searched for me. It began with his reply to my question, “Are they all dead?”
Grandfather said, “No.”
Elephant Island
Grandfather blamed Israel when I failed to return in Black Crane. He shouted down my family’s protests and chose for them, they would winter on Mead’s Kiss. They had sufficient supplies; this overlooks their fears. The major event that winter was that Molly Rogers gave birth, a son, named Solomon for Israel’s dead father. By late spring (November 1996), the increase in refugee traffic, the dissension among my family, the threat of the Pattie gunboats, all obliged Grandfather to declare himself. He carved his name in the rock, then put to sea, south on the sixtieth meridian.
Grandfather kept to his sailing course for over a month, back and forth between the Falklands and the Antarctic convergence looking for Black Crane. The cumulative stress of the blows finally shattered Angel of Death’s foremast. They were driven east toward the South Orkneys. Somewhere just off the edge of the retreating ice pack, they were rescued by a European warship—Russian, I think, perhaps an escort for a whaling fleet—a forerunner of the as-of-yet-unborn Ice Cross. They were taken to the first landfall, the well-built British naval station on the southwestern shore of Elephant Island, then serving as a staging point for the several northern European republics asserting their claim over West Antarctica. There was no network of camps then, probably not more than a few thousand wretches scattered from the South Orkneys across the Scotia Sea. The refugees were not then the major concern; instead, several republics of the North were in the early stages of a confrontation with republics of the South over territory—sea, land, and ice.
The volcanic eruptions were worse then than when I wintered at Golgotha. These ruptures blocked an attempt that summer to evacuate the wretches. It would seem that the panic had set in among the authorities, as it did at Stockholm, Port Praia, Port Stanley. I also speculate that the darker aspects of the Charity Factor had taken hold: no nation state, no treaty organization, would accept relocated refugees prematurely without an international agreement, for fear that such benevolence might make them host to an alien, dissident population. In brief, desperation made policy: mercy to a point, no voluntarism. Charity Bentham had described a system, New Benthamism, that came to regard the complete salvation of the wretched to be without utility, not the greatest good for the greatest number, and so the Charity Factor was applied in full.
The winter closed on my family on Elephant Island. Their situation was severe, if not as bad as what we found at Golgotha. But then, terror is relative. My family were some of the earliest prisoners of the ice. Grandfather would not quit. Neither would Cleopatra. Those two seemed to have conjoined in will and desire the first winter on Mead’s Kiss. Grandfather did not expand on their negotiations; Cleopatra would later say only that she did what had to be done. The two of them struck a fateful bargain. Cleopatra promised Grandfather that she would help him get what he wanted, into a position where he could continue his search for Grim Fiddle. Grandfather promised Cleopatra that he would help her do what she had to do to save herself, and also, her mother. The very same mother whom Cleopatra had tried to despise as a betrayer of Cesare Furore, Cleopatra transformed into the motive for Cleopatra’s complete sacrifice of her blessings. I shall have much more to say of this perverse turn later, for it hardened the heart of a woman already disposed to imperial coldness. For now, it suffices to say that it was a martyrdom fit for the comedy, to say that the daughter so loved the mother that she gave her only true treasure, her pride, to protect that mother’s only true treasure, her daughter.
Cleopatra became the mistress of one of the ablest officers at the Elephant Island naval station, an African colonial named Peter Grootgibeon. She thereby secured the welfare of her mother and my family through that winter. She might well have gotten them out the next summer: Charity Bentham was a Nobel Laureate, even given that she had forfeited what currency she had in the world in order to regain Peregrine. Their good luck did not hold. A man-made catastrophe intervened. Grandfather said it was a war of