The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 23

foment treason. It cost Thord heavily to escape that net. There were many nasty turns in all this, such as an undercurrent of Loyalist prejudice against homosexuality and possibly sexuality in general. What is important here is that the Cartesian League contained more than a few of the Swedish and American radicals from the War Resisters League of the 1960s.

In time, the Loyalists directed their loathsome rhetoric against the small American exile community. Soon enough, all Americans in Stockholm, regardless of their politics, came under attack. The Swedes chose to forget the King’s onetime Social Democratic government’s opposition to the Vietnam war. Peregrine, Israel, Guy, and Earle were anachronisms. The word was passed that they and their kind were under suspicion, along with everyone else not certifiably Norse. This blanket slander was helped by the fact that many of the Americans had police records dating back to the 1960s, and many of them were genuine gangsters, still dealing in contraband and rackets. I do not overlook the fact that my family enjoyed the succor of a Swedish smuggler.

The Loyalists denounced the whole of the American exile community with a part of it, an old trick, Israel assured me. Whenever the King’s Spies arrested a thug who happened to be an American, the politicians would haul the stars and stripes through their foul mouths. This resulted in a precarious existence for the Americans, some of its impetus dating from as far back as the American embargo on European technology in the early 1980s. Nevertheless it might well have calmed down if not for a gruesome crime in the halls of the King’s contrived splendor—Peregrine Ide murdered Cesare Furore at the Nobel Prize Ball.

Peregrine’s trial delighted the Loyalists. They aroused their faithful by emphasizing Peregrine’s seeming lack of remorse. The King’s prosecutor, a Loyalist sympathizer, insisted that Peregrine tell the court why he had murdered. The defense counsel, provided by the court, tried to prevent such testimony; but Peregrine spoke anyway, in a whisper, his larynx damaged permanently in the murder:

“I—because I wanted to.”

When the King’s court sentenced Peregrine to life imprisonment, the Loyalists exploded with hate. They demanded Peregrine’s life be forfeit. They wanted his heart cut out. They wanted his head fed to the fish. They wanted him to die in screams. I do not exaggerate. They said these things, repeatedly. I heard worse on the radio. And since there had been no death penalty in the Kingdom since the defeat of the German blasphemers, the Loyalists achieved the neat trick of increasing their power by demanding from the King’s government what it could not sanction. There was still an inherent decency in Sweden that no amount of cant had been able to overcome. The King, who was not as stupid as he seemed, even went so far at his birthday address to declare, “I shall not wash my hands of this man’s fate.”

This was ill-advised imagery. The Loyalist mobs chanted “Fiend! Fiend!” in reply to the King’s bravura; it was not clear if they meant Peregrine or the King or both. The Loyalists manipulated the King’s dilemma. Peregrine became the goat that one could flail without restraint, knowing the whole while that one was actually castigating the King’s government. Whenever the Loyalists were denounced by the good men left in government for another of their race riots, the Loyalists screamed about the moral corruption of the “American fiend’s protectors.” The illogic was intentional. The politics were effective. The Loyalists wrapped themselves in piety, dared anyone to mention the blood on their hands. The contest became as religious as it was political. There was talk of the need for an evangelical republic in order to restore order and what was called godliness to the land.

There was one Loyalist leader whose gift for demagoguery soon lifted him into the position of holy strategist for the movement. This was apt, if opportunistic, for he was the head pastor of the wealthiest and most aristocrat-packed Lutheran church in Stockholm. His power grew as the King’s government weakened, since he represented himself as the spokesman for, the embodiment of, the traditional Norse ideas of purity and vengeance, which he claimed would return the country to harmony. He was chief of those calling for a national oath of Christian fealty, and for a referendum on the question of making Sweden an Evangelical Republic. He was a fearmonger of the first rank, a genius at mass hysteria and at denouncing his detractors as demons. Also, he could throw himself completely into deranged calls for Peregrine’s death. His name was Mord Fiddle.

“Me and Moll were down shopping on the quays last night,” Israel wrote me in the spring of my fourth year at Vexbeggar, “and we got rousted by a marshal for a Loyalist rally. It was a taffy pull. We went along, wanting no trouble from the thugs. They had the square fixed up like a birthday cake, with a chorus of one million eight-year-olds singing ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ That stirred them up, definitely a gooseberry crowd. I had to keep telling myself they were the same folk with the taste for arson. Old Adolf, he was partial to torchlight and kettledrums. These people are more for harps and pinwheels.

“Then a couple of minor angels got up on the platform to remind us how wonderful we are. Sublime homes. Sublime children. Sublime duty. This is dopiness like who’d believe? Where is sense? What happened to it? It was just here. They burned out four tenements last week. In the daytime. They don’t like the night, claim it’s for wolves. Is it this bad back home? I can’t believe I’m on the same planet. Moll tells me I can’t let this get me down like I was. I haven’t got the rage I used to, something inside is broken. I promise I’m trying. I’m definitely off the drinking. I just want to run and keep on running. How did I get so far out of goose step?

“Once