The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 151
My memory of Cleopatra has hurt me. My hands feel as heavy as my heart. I have one more episode I must try to tell. I introduce it by mocking myself. I have rushed to explain the rise and fall of my kingship as if it were to be explained by the motives of the players. This is foolishness. I anticipate a criticism: does such a thing as effect follow from such a thing as cause, or is not every event an independent effect of nothing, a result of nothing? Be lucid, Grim. I ask myself what difference there would have been had Grootgibeon or Jaguaquara or Fives O’Birne gathered control of Anvers Island, and I and mine had bent to their will, or perished in hopelessness? I see none. Hundreds of thousands would still have died abandoned and forgotten. The home of the gods would still have feigned ignorance of our plight and enjoyed their stolen fruit. Black and hurt half-men might have made the camps what they were, but it was Antarctica, that wall of blizzards, that determined what happened in the camps, or perhaps determined nothing, lay absolute and unchanged by what we wretched suffered on its icy shores. More confusing to me still, there is the question: Does perceived history determine mankind’s future; or does mankind have the authority to remake its own history any time mankind wants, and continually? Grim Fiddle here acknowledges his consternation before the paradox of predeterminism and free will. I translate to the tiny scale of me and my loved ones: What would it have signified for the ice camps and my ice kingdom if Cleopatra had not been corrupted by her loathing? or if I had been able to love her and set her free? or if Lazarus could have set aside his doubt about me, Cleopatra, himself, justice, and taken charge of our destiny?—ours, and not that of “all just people.” I suggest a good reply is that it would not have signified. The wretches would still be dead. The gods would still be luxuriating.
I realize this is suspect, as if the New Benthamites have captured my mind, have convinced me that love, fear, decency, sacrifice, revenge, criminal responsibility, freedom do not signify, as if what pertains is just the hedonic calculus, and philosophy is a whine. This is not the case, yet I believe I lack the wisdom to set down my discrimination keenly. Men and women think that what they do and how they do it does signify. History is what they have done. Philosophy is how they have done it. Yet there are turns of such pervasive darkness that the will and the heart, the history and the philosophy, of men and women are lost in the turmoil.
My Kingdom of Ice seems a fit example. We wretches threw our high dreams and our weak flesh against Antarctica. The ice and the volcanoes continued as before. What is accusation against one’s brother in the face of a black-ice island? What is massacre of tens of thousands in the face of the fumes pouring from Satan’s Seat? What is food for a famine-bloated child in the face of that black winter that blots out compassion? And then, the scale of it, what is truth and falsehood in the face of that endless wind that hurtles off the Antarctic plateau to churn the rock and sea into an ice world that does not seem the planet Earth, that does seem a place and a time where and when no human being could ever venture? What fool Grim Fiddle is to ask. How pretentious Grim Fiddle is to think that what he wrought in the South matters. The heart is the truth, I claim. Antarctica has no heart. It is five million square miles of near lifelessness, where only at the edges can anything that feels pain cling to misery to know it is still alive. Antarctica seems one step short of the cold, black, exploded universe that spills over my ice prison. The deepest mystery for me here in my ice prison, looking up to the sky whenever I can, is not, why does the universe exist, why does that aspect of the inhumane cosmos, Antarctica, exist? It is, rather, how strange of God to have made mankind, surely a mistake caught between the utter fire and the utter cold of creation, and to have made mankind in such a way that a sinner and penitent like Grim Fiddle can think that he ever counted for more than a germ. Grim Fiddle’s history and philosophy, mankind’s history and philosophy, is no sense. It is laughter.
I relate hurriedly my last days as King of Antarctica. It was early summer, six years after Grandfather’s death and my murder of Jaguaquara, at the beginning of my seventh summer as warlord of Anvers Island. The Bransfield Strait was open with several lanes through the floes. Lykantropovin was dead seven months, not by my hand but by my office. Germanicus was dead two months, of wounds and despair. The past winter had ripped up the ice camps as one might gut an elephant seal. My capitanes in charge of the camps sent cutters to Anvers pleading for food, discipline, hope. Another cutter arrived from the Falklands bearing an envoy from the republican signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier, who presented Lazarus with terms for a truce. My capitanes remained in their halls throughout the Palmer archipelago and the South Sheltlands, waiting to continue the war or to die. The Ice Cross was