The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 154
I have not seen Lazarus’s triumph. I have been told, by my tribunal, and by Diomedes. It is said to be a single sheet. It is said to be entitled “The Constitution for the People’s Republic of Antarctica.” It is said to indict a tyranny and to declare the tyrant, Grim Fiddle, overthrown. It is said to announce that henceforth the people in the South are citizens of a republic in which no man or woman is above another, in which there is neither black nor white, male nor female, first nor last.
It is said to be in Lazarus’s hand. Did Cleopatra sign it? That is my fancy. There would have been no need for signatures. The republican masters would have accepted any scrap in order to conceal their crimes and put a new face on their war with Grim Fiddle. With that document, and with the power to interpret it as they wished, Grim Fiddle was made the transgressor, the ice camps were made Grim Fiddle’s victims, the Ice Cross was made the beleaguered savior of the South.
Lazarus could not have been surprised when he, the traitor, was soon betrayed by his enemies, the faceless benefactors who sponsored the Ice Cross. It pleases me to suppose that Lazarus had thought through his deed. He sacrificed me and the kingdom we had built out of revenge in order to give birth to a people’s republic of mystical egalitarianism, in order to insure that this people’s republic existed only to be dismantled immediately and its citizenry resettled a world away as soon as possible.
What else for him? The camps were doomed. The Hielistos were uncontrollable. The Ice Cross was broken by exhaustion. Only a bold stroke, a magnificent philosophical construction, could have saved anything. Lazarus took up his pen and made those marks, “The Constitution for the People’s Republic of Antarctica.” He called it a people’s republic because that was his mind. For this alone I reward his genius.
Lazarus knew that the republics of the North and South that had signed the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier would try to corrupt the government that represented the victorious Hielistos and the ice camps under their control. Lazarus knew that if he went to them representing a hierarchical government—a monarchy, or parliamentary monarchy, or congressional republic—then the republican masters would be able to manipulate the negotiations by promising amnesty and resettlement like bribes, to fall to the powerful in the conclaves of the Hielistos and the ice camps, while the wretches were abandoned again. It would have been the oldest, most trite manipulation: the victorious oppressed seduced to become the oppressors. Lazarus understood that only by making every human being in Antarctica an inviolable equal in my victory could he insure immediate and complete dismantling of the camps and relocation of the internees—the most wretched out first, the most wretched out last. And Lazarus knew that the only way to promote such a fabulous desire was to constitute the ice camps and the Hielistos in such a way that they represented a truly unworldly idea: All men and women are equal. I believe it no accident that the language I am told that appears in Lazarus’s document resembles a description of another unworldly place, the garden of Eden.
Lazarus conceived the Kingdom of Antarctica to secure impossible liberty, then he conceived the People’s Republic of Antarctica to secure impossible justice. I am aware that the record shows now that Lazarus’s dare was a failure, that the dissolution of the ice camps that did follow his negotiations in Africa and the establishment of the ice state by “The Constitution for the People’s Republic of Antarctica” was almost as ghastly as if it had been done by madmen. This does not mean to me that Lazarus’s grasp and reach are forgotten or dismissable. To repeat his balm to me, do not speak of what is, speak of what must be. Lazarus stood firmly for the highest ideals conceivable by him, a perfect egalitarian state, an Edenic republic. He was a hero. If he failed to save hundreds of thousands, he did save tens of thousands, and he did so by making a deal with men he knew to be treacherous. They were what he had. And if they were soon overwhelmed by the scale of their task to relocate the wretched in the camps, this does not take from Lazarus. Lazarus knew himself, knew his enemies. He could have stood by reluctantly, could have made excuses and stalled. He chose instead to gather his reason and his inspiration and then to plunge.
And is it my excited mind, or is there not a lovely joke in Lazarus’s triumph? Did he not overthrow me in order to construct what he believed as perfect a state as man will ever manage on the Kingdom of Earth? In Lazarus’s People’s Republic of Antarctica there was no time for factionalism, rebellion, cynicism, blood feuding, and degradation. There was only time for a smile at the grand conceit of an icebound Eden. And then it was gone, its loyal citizenry back to green and purple fields. Its birth was its death.
In my rush I have sung poorly of that great man, Lazarus Furore. I met him one wild day when I was almost twenty-two years old, and found him a copper-skinned ideologue, a sharp, fast, angry young man. I left him one wilder day when I was thirty-five, and left him a scarred, shrunken, weathered mourner, also a brilliant leader, a splendid hero who believed in freedom, a better day, the goodness in all just people. Most tribute of all, Lazarus Furore believed he