The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 82

selfconfident, secretive way of his. He accepted, in late summer, the proposition of the elders to permit a qualified election of a constrained president of an ambiguously defined Assembly. Then he immediately set about campaigning for what he called a true republic for South Georgia—written laws, universal suffrage, elected officials, coexistent executive, legislative, judicial branches of government—which he said he would “harvest” (he also used the word forge) as soon as he had me, as the president, to convene the Gaunttown Assembly not only as a “people’s voice” but also as a “constitutional assembly.”

Lazarus saw his challenge as I did not, and prepared himself, with book learning and rhetoric, for the battle ahead.

Abigail came by herself to tell me the results of the elders’ vote. It was late summer, coolish, misty. The election was not unanimous. The Hospidar’s candidate, Christian Rose, and the Gaunt’s candidate, Kevin Gaunt, took more than half the vote together. I was president by plurality, not majority, a result that I did not then perceive as auguring contrariness. The immediate result was that I was free of one flock, woolly heads, and promised to another kind, woolly-headed, hardheaded; I was also relieved of my duties as a Volunteer, required to move into the upstairs rooms of the Assembly Hall.

Abigail was heartsick. She stayed by the door as she told me how her father had hugged her after the vote, had thanked her for helping me gain my “divine role.” She said it was the first her father had touched her since childhood. That was not the cause of her melancholy. Lazarus had told her she should be careful with me for a while, lest the other factions use a charge of profligacy against me, and she exaggerated his advice. She said we must stop our affair, that she had come to say good-bye. I knew she was testing my devotion.

“You belong to them,” she said. “Lazarus says you’re changed. You’re the only elected official on the island. You’re no more the man I’ve loved, no more Sam’s dad, my man. They did this to Samson. They made him their bloody captain, and he was changed too. Even if he’d come back to me, I’d lost him to them. Lord forgive me, I loved you’ before when you were a bonnie sad boy, and I love you still. I can’t help you do this thing. I mark them. They’ve taken you from me. I can’t save you no more. Save yourself.”

“What can happen?” I protested. “Lazarus says I’m a figurehead.”

“Like the bow of a ship, what they shoot at,” she said.

“Abbie, I’m not Samson,” I tried, softly, “not David either.”

I meant it to lighten her heart. It was our joke. She smiled, but if ever there was a smile of unhappiness, that was it. She said, “Oh, it’s daft we are, the pair of us. Darling Grim, trust me, save yourself.” And then she came over and kissed me, and took me. I was theirs, she said; she took me as hers. I cannot sharply recall her scent, or her touch; I can still hear her cry in passion. She was loud. I liked that. Afterward, I tried to convince her our lives would improve, that as soon as the troubles passed, we could live together, could marry, give her sons and our Sam a proper home. I tried to persuade her with my wishes, and Lazarus’s ideas, and Germanicus’s strength. I tried to prove to her we were not changed, just wiser. She said she wanted to believe me, said she was afraid to marry another to lose. She put her head on my breast, did not weep. I realized then, embracing sweet, sturdy, haunted Abigail, that we were changed, that I was changed. In her eyes, I was a man to lose. I pushed it away, that shadow, and pulled her closer to protect her from her doubts. In the weeks that followed, I continued my seduction of Abigail even as my new status took me from her. As the fall closed on us, however, all my eager words, all our high dreams, all that we as free men and women could do, were undone by a natural catastrophe.

Exodus

I HAVE mentioned the fury of the Scotia Sea, raked by the westerlies and churned by the Falkland Current, what the sealers said was the home of the mothers of freak waves, as massive as rolling mountains, frequently dwarfing even that behemoth that tossed Angel of Death mid-Atlantic and more frequently draped in a dense fog that smeared the boundary between sea and sky. The sealers told another story of the Scotia Sea, one that overshadowed the dread of those saltwater ranges. They told of the thirteen consecutive winters when the ice pack that spread each winter from the Antarctic actually pushed out to wrap South Georgia in a howling white desert. That was said to have been in the nineteenth century, when only whalers and sealers sailed farther south than the fifty-fifth parallel, when only crazed sealers dared cross the sixtieth parallel for the wealth of the rookeries on the South Orkneys and South Shetlands. It was a broad account, sealer talk, what Christmas Muir told me was “banker’s bait,” meaning it was likely more an excuse for poor catches—passed on to the banking houses that funded the sealing expedition—than it was reliable oceanology. The notion that the Weddell Sea, which cups Antarctica from Queen Maud Land to Graham Land, could extend its ice sheet more than seven hundred miles beyond the Antarctic circle is fantastic.

I watched it happen May and June of my sixth year on South Georgia. Each clear morning, one in four that time of year, I would leave my rooms in the Assembly Hall and climb to the high heath to stand transfixed as the southeastern horizon brightened with what is called an ice blink. The vanguard of the pack approached in a line across the face of