The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 139
I see now how simpleminded I have been to believe that I could complete my work before my luck changed again, and these years of effort were strangled. Grim Fiddle is a lucky man. I should have anticipated that what began in contretemps, continued in serendipity, would come to failure. I intended years more of autobiography, greedy and lonely man. I had hope for a manuscript thrice this size, more, since I have had no need to finish before my own end. There is intervention. My work is arrested unfinished, and what I have managed to remember and to confess could be for nothing if I do not gain the time to explain completely.
I should not have kept my circumstances apart from my confession. Now I must confuse my undone work with details at odd angle to my narrative. I suppose that I thought when I began that anyone who read this might know some of Grim Fiddle, and those who did not would not care to be confused by the author’s day-to-day endeavor. This supposition was itself complicated by the fact that there was no single point that began this work, no first page, first chapter, instead stories that tumbled in my mind, that required drafting and redrafting until I was able to teach myself what little I know of how to tell a story. I am embarrassed to admit that even these few hundred pages have taken all my strength, and how long? I cannot say accurately, twelve years, more, for I started, stopped, paused for years, began again.
I also suppose that I kept secret my place in this world because I was and am ashamed of what I am, did not want to taint the honest spirit of my work. I write as much for companionship as for other cause, like my Sam. This manuscript has been my dearest friend, filled with the voices of my loved ones, and what would it have served to cut it up with the diary voice of Grim Fiddle, author and convict.
The answer is that it would have served the truth: Grim Fiddle is a prisoner convicted of crimes against humanity. I stand condemned of conspiracy to make war, and of making war, against governments and peoples. They referred to me variously as “this remorseless mass-murderer” and “the twenty-first century’s first unspeakable monster.” Their verdict of guilty was less interesting than the justification not to execute me. My tribunal ruled that the best lesson to be achieved by the condemnation of a man like me was to refuse to take my life. My judges said, “Too many are dead. Let this mercy put all who murder to shame.” More, my judges opined that the most fitting punishment they could conceive for me was not to release me from the weight of my guilt, rather to keep me imprisoned for the remainder of my life that I might consider what I had done. I am meant to live as long as humanly possible in infamy.
That is nearly three decades past. Now Grim Fiddle has grown old. That is what he is, an old man, sickly now and again, still extraordinarily game, with no evidence death will soon release him from his punishment. My judges are dust. Their just wrath lives on in this place, my prison. My guards call it the ice prison, over the objection of the new commandant, who has replaced Joannes Diomedes Nestoraxes, the old soldier. Diomedes was my jailer for nearly fourteen years. He regarded his work as seriously as his prayers and books. He obeyed the letter of the laws verdict on Grim Fiddle. Nevertheless he was my friend, granted me my she-wolf, Helen, a pup when the guards found her on the glacier. It was Diomedes who named this place the ice prison, and me the ice prisoner. It and I are man-made complexes, located above the quay, beneath the towering southern lip of the jade glacier. This is Elephant Island, the southeast shore. The Ice Cross’s headquarters, where Lykantropovin ruled and died, was a mile to the west, under what is now a fresh mountain of volcanic rock. That is also where Peregrine and Charity and Molly are buried, somewhere under a mountain that was my ally in my victory over Lykantropovin nearly thirty years ago. I celebrated what would have been Charity’s ninetieth birthday this past winter, and have looked forward to Peregrine’s same next winter. Not that I would be permitted to get over there. I have not left this prison for nearly twenty-nine years.
My ice prison is administered by an organization that changes its acronym frequently. I think of how Diomedes would joke, when he read me my charge and sentence once a month as dictated by law, by scrambling the words of the sponsoring body into anagrams for me to decipher. The present commandant, a Canadian national named Gardiner, whom I think of as new though he has been here four years, does not care to keep me informed of affairs back in the place that four of the guards, Germans, call among themselves, so I overhear them, “planet Earth.” They do not laugh when they say it. This post is no honor. Gardiner seems to believe he is banished here, for unexplained cause, and has brought with him a niggardliness that has worn on morale. He has none of the poet’s blood that made this an austere pleasure for Diomedes. Towards me, Gardiner is terse, stiff, moody. My