In 1975, a few years after his twenty-three-year reign as premier of Newfoundland concluded, and long before the “end of history” was proclaimed, Smallwood consulted with an end-o-chronologist. At first, he thought the doctor was just another charlatan, and his “youth serum” just another form of snake oil. But the man proved his claims and his worth by extending Smallwood’s life indefinitely.
More than five hundred years later, Smallwood is the only living Father of Disintegration. Disintegration followed what was known in the West as the Civil War and in the East as the War of Western Aggression, fought in 2056 when, its oil wells dry, Alberta attacked Newfoundland but was routed by an armada of Newfoundland gunboats. Smallwood led the Newfoundland fleet and his people were proud.
He has won 123 consecutive elections by acclamation, but is no more a dictator than other immortal leaders of the world. He has, and has always had, political opponents, but they switched allegiance to him when he offered each of them a Cabinet post and its attendant immortality. For hundreds of years now, to the bewilderment of the mortals, Smallwood’s most embittered political enemies have crossed the House of Assembly to sit with him. During elections, the mortals have had no party to vote for but Smallwood’s.
Every day is his seventy-fifth birthday. No one else in his Cabinet is allowed to have a birthday, not even once a year, but Smallwood’s is celebrated every night at nine. His ministers sing,
We hope we live to see a hundred
We hope we live to see a hundred
We hope we live to see a hundred
A hundred more of you.
He does not drink at these soirees, though his ministers drink so much that they are known among the mortals as the Liquor Cabinet. His ministers are all ministers without portfolio, Smallwood having reserved for himself the right to run all seventy-three departments of government. His ministers do only whatever hack work he lacks the time, energy, or inclination for.
Smallwood and his end-o-chronologist doctor are the only Newfoundlanders with direct access to the youth serum, which doesn’t reverse the ageing process but merely stops it. Being injected with the serum once a week does the trick. Smallwood administers all injections himself and keeps in check whatever recalcitrance remains among Cabinet members by suspending the serum privileges of upstarts. All of his ministers’ apparent ages are greater than his; to judge by appearances, some are well over a hundred. There are and have been no women in Smallwood’s Cabinet, though a group of them attend his birthday parties every night. These women, because they too receive the youth serum, are forever in their late twenties. Smallwood always leaves the parties before the Never Ageing Girls arrive.
One of the advantages of being immortal is that you eventually make—and make up for—every possible mistake. Smallwood thought back on the Upper Churchill contract with Quebec, the Come By Chance oil refinery, joining Canada. With centuries of experience under his belt, he is far less likely now to be duped by an outsider. Still, he has had lapses, such as when he signed on with a Norwegian company that falsely claimed it had found a way to convert seagull waste into methane gas. The Under-Utilized Feces Agreement between Newfoundland and Norway expires in eight hundred years, until which time Norway will gather up and sell to Newfoundland all of its seagull waste. For a hundred years, freighters full of gull feces have arrived every week. There were mishaps at sea, which Smallwood’s detractors gleefully referred to as “shitwrecks,” and pictures ran in newspapers and on TV of seabirds floundering about covered in waste of their own creation. Bleeding-heart, bucket-wielding fecologists in rubber boots tried in vain to wipe them clean.
Outraged over the number of times that Quebec had renewed its lucrative option on the Upper Churchill, Smallwood built new turbines on the Lower Churchill and diverted all the power corridors so that they ran through Newfoundland and not a single watt reached La Belle Province. Ignoring the advice of his advisers, whose advice on any subject he had yet to take, Smallwood built a hydro-power corridor from Labrador to New York, submerging cables beneath the Strait of Belle Isle, then extending them down the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, and submerging them again beneath the Gulf of St. Lawrence and all the way to the island of Manhattan. The diversion of the power lines was so costly that it will be a thousand years before the new Churchill project turns a profit, but at least the humiliation is over.
