The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 141
Most importantly, Diomedes writes that he set aside his own writing to investigate some of the history that I touch upon with ignorance in my work. He knows that the many holes I have left weaken my project, and it is a great kindness that he has determined to educate himself in my favor. I realize that he must have been planning to write at length to help me, and I can guess that the obstacle he saw he had to overcome was how to reach me. It is one of the crudest terms of my sentence that I am not permitted to correspond, nor am I permitted mail. I suppose then that his delay in writing these last four years has involved his effort to discover some way to pry open Gardiner.
In the course of his researches, Diomedes has not only consulted records entombed in the vaults of whatever treaty organization that now represents the remains of the Ice Cross, but also has written letters of inquiry to Sweden and America. I do not believe he has contacted Cleopatra. He does not mention her. This may mean she is dead, most likely means nothing. He races over these matters to the crux of my crisis. Diomedes says his surprise was unbounded when he received word (not a letter, some sort of communique from a technology of which I am ignorant) from an American journalist who spoke of me, Grim Fiddle, as the center of a political controversy in the Americas and Europe—in the North.
It seems that a clique of uncertain persuasion has seized upon the history of the Age of Exile as an issue they can exploit for their own aggrandizement. I am supposing. I am intrinsically antagonistic. They call themselves the One World Reunion, also the One World Society, also the Reunionists. They have cells in every major northern city. Their platform is vast and monolithic, with a unifying theme that seems to be opposition to the political-science fashion of the last one hundred years, since the Second World War, which they say has been characterized by extremism, separatism, chauvinism, liberationism, and ever more divisive polemic supporting racial, geographic, and religious purity. The Reunionists are rabid heterogenes. They are savvy revisionists. They claim—and I translate this into my terms because I am not sure of their language—that politics is not a science but a curse of the Tower of Babylon, so much babble at cross-purposes. The Reunionists have launched themselves against the hypothesis that there are legitimate concepts such as the first world, second world, third world, nonaligned world, developed and underdeveloped world, Christian and Moslem world, the East, West, North, and South. They decry what I have called fantastic architecture. They call the assumption of separate self-authentication to be nonsense, claim that a house divided is no house at all, assert that there is no man or woman on earth today who belongs to just one country, ancestry, religion, or race, and therefore the idea that people of color, or people of a holy book, or people of industry should gather separately is folly. They claim that the fracturing of the world into a series of silent confederacies has silenced reason, and that the reunion of mankind is the call of the future. Their enemy is what they call liberationist separatism. Their aim is conflation, synthesis, and metamorphosis. They say they are the champions of the mongrel.
I reiterate that Diomedes has written in haste, promising another letter soon. This must mean that he has found the crack in Gardiner’s heart’s door. This outpost receives a delivery by ship roughly once a month during the summer, so I cannot hope for more until late January. In the meantime, I must suffer the implications of Diomedes’s brief remarks about how the Reunionists have addressed themselves to the history of what I have called the wretched, what Diomedes and I call the Age of Exile, and in particular the politics of the ice camps, the Ice Cross, the rest of it, including the whole story I have yet to tell of the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Antarctica, the birth and measured infanticide of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. It hurts me that I am obliged to introduce these last matters in this hasty, sloppy way. I have been so cautious. Now I must gloss. I have cause. Diomedes writes that the Reunionists are pressing American and European treaty organizations to reopen the arrest, indictment, trial, condemnation, and imprisonment of me, Grim Fiddle, fallen warlord of Antarctica.
The Reunionists say that I am a victim of lies and collusion, say I am unjustly condemned, made to bear the whole weight of a period that vouchsafed the murder of millions by starvation and hopelessness. I suppose that if the Reunionists knew my mind, they would say they have countercharged Brave New Benthamism and counterindicted the Charity Factor. The Reunionists declare my twenty-nine years of mute confinement to be far in excess of humane penance, inappropriate for any transgression I might have commited as an outlaw, guerrilla, terrible avenger, and warlord. In his letter Diomedes uses the phrase “long-wronged and forgotten hero of the long forgotten and wronged.”
The sum is this: The One World Reunion is maneuvering for the resurrection of what they see as the aged scapegoat Grim Fiddle.
Gardiner finished his presentation without a sigh, abruptly, as if in midsentence. He would not show me the letter. I have hope that he might, for he seemed moved by my reaction. I wept and I shook. Gardiner presumed that I was rejoicing at the hope offered by such an aberration, and ended our exchange with contrived pity. He said that he had not told me of the letter immediately upon receipt, which he seems to have gotten on my birthday last