Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I trusted her!”

  “She loved the girl, too, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Very much.” Vale took a deep, shuddering breath; began to reclaim himself, felt the god leaving him, subsiding into the hidden world again. The relief was exquisite. “Take back what belongs to you. But please, don’t be too hard on Olivia.”

  Mrs. Sanders-Moss looked at him with a very gratifying expression of awe.

  She thanked him effusively. He turned down the offer of money. Both her tentative smile and her shaken demeanor were encouraging, very promising indeed. But, of course, only time would tell.

  When she had taken her umbrella and gone he opened a bottle of brandy and retreated to an upstairs room where the rain rattled down a frosted window, the gaslights were turned high, and the only book in sight was a tattered pulp-paper volume entitled His Mistress’s Petticoat.

  To outward appearance, the change worked in him by the manifestation of the god was subtle. Inwardly, he felt exhausted, almost wounded. There was a rawness, not quite pain, which extended to every limb. His eyes burned. The liquor helped, but it would be another day until he was completely himself.

  With luck the brandy would moderate the dreams that followed a manifestation. In the dreams he found himself inevitably in some cold wilderness, some borderless vast gray desert, and when out of a misplaced curiosity or simply mischief he lifted up a random stone he uncovered a hole from which poured countless insects of some unknown and hideous kind, many-legged, pincered, venomous, swarming up his arm and invading his skull.

  He wasn’t a religious man. He had never believed in spirits, table-rapping, astrology, or the Resurrected Christ. He wasn’t sure he believed in any of those things now; the sum of his belief resided in this single god, the one that had touched him with such awful, irresistible intimacy.

  He had the skills of a confidence man and he was certainly not averse to a profitable larceny, but there had been no collusion in the case of, for instance, Mrs. Sanders-Moss; she was a mystery to him, and so was the servant girl Olivia and the memento mori in the shoe box. His own prophecies took him by surprise. The words, not his own, had fallen from his lips like ripe fruit from a tree.

  The words served him well enough, mind you. But they served another purpose, too.

  Larceny, by comparison, would have been infinitely more simple.

  But he took another glass of brandy and consoled himself: You don’t come to immortality by the low road.

  A week passed. Nothing. He began to worry.

  Then a note in the afternoon mail:

  Dr. Vale,

  The treasures have been recovered. You have my most boundless gratitude.

  I am entertaining guests this coming Thursday at six o’clock for dinner and conversation. If you happen to be free to attend, you would be most welcome.

  RSVP

  Mrs. Edward Sanders-Moss

  She had signed it, Eleanor.

  Chapter Three

  Odense docked at the makeshift harbor in the marshy estuary of the Thames, a maze of colliers, oilers, heighters and sailing ships gathered in from the outposts of the Empire. Guilford Law, plus family, plus the body of the Finch expedition and all its compasses, alidades, dried food, and paraphernalia, transferred to a ferry bound up the Thames to London. Guilford personally supervised the loading of his photographic equipment — the carefully crated 8''x10'' glass plates, the camera, lenses, and tripod.

  The ferry was a cold and noisy steamer but blessed with generous windows. Caroline comforted Lily, who disliked the hard wooden benches, while Guilford gave himself up to the scrolling shoreline.

  It was his first real view of the new world. The Thames mouth and London were the single most populous territory of the continent: most known, most seen, often photographed, but still wild — smug, Guilford thought, with wildness. The distant shore was dense with alien growth, hollow flute trees and reed grasses obscure in the gathering shadows of a chill afternoon. The strangeness of it burned in Guilford like a coal. After all he had read and dreamed, here was the tangible and impossible fact itself, not an illustration in a book but a living mosaic of light and shade and wind. The river ran green with false lotus, colonies of domed pads drifting in the water: a hazard to navigation, he’d been told, especially in summer, when the blooms came down from the Cotswolds in dense congregations and choked the screws of the steamships. He caught a glimpse of John Sullivan on the glass-walled promenade deck. Sullivan had been to Europe in 1918, had made collections at the mouth of the Rhine, but that experience obviously hadn’t jaded him; there was an intensity of observation in the botanist’s eyes that made conversation unthinkable.

  Soon enough there was human litter along the shore, rough cabins, an abandoned farm, a smoldering garbage pit; and then the outskirts of the Port of London itself, and even Caroline took an interest.

  The city was a random collation on the north bank of the river. It had been carved into the wilderness by soldiers and loyalist volunteers recalled by Lord Kitchener from the colonies, and it was hardly the London of Christopher Wren: it looked to Guilford like any smoky frontier town, a congregation of sawmills, hotels, docks, and warehouses. He identified the silhouette of the city’s single famous monument, a column of South African marble cut to commemorate the losses of 1912. The Miracle had not been kind to human beings. It had replaced rocks with rocks, plants with stranger plants, animals with vaguely equivalent creatures — but of the vanished human population or any sentient species, no trace had ever been found.

  Taller than the memorial pillar were the great iron cranes dredging and improving the port facilities. Beyond these, most striking of all, was the skeletal framework of the new St. Paul’s Cathedral, astride what must be Ludgate Hill. No bridges crossed the Thames, though there were plans to build one; a variety of ferries accommodated the traffic.

  He felt Lily tug his sleeve. “Daddy,” she said solemnly. “A monster.”

  “What’s that, Lil?”

  “A monster! Look.”

  His wide-eyed daughter pointed off the port bow, upriver.

  Guilford told Lily the name of the monster even as his heart began to beat faster: a silt snake, the settlers called it, or sometimes river snake. Caroline took his other arm tightly as the chatter of voices ceased. The silt snake lifted its head above the ship’s prow in a motion startlingly gentle, given that its skull was a blunt wedge the size of a child’s coffin attached to a twenty-foot neck. The creature was harmless, Guilford knew — placid, literally a lotus-eater — but it was frighteningly large.

  Below the waterline the creature would have anchored itself in the mud. The silt snake’s legs were boneless cartilaginous spurs that served to brace it against river currents. Its skin was an oily white, mottled in places with algal green. The creature appeared fascinated by the human activity ashore. It aimed its apposite eyes in turn at the harbor cranes, blinked, and opened its mouth soundlessly. Then it spotted a mass of floating lotus pads and scooped them from the water in one deft bobbing motion before submerging again into the Thames.

  Caroline buried her head against Guilford’s shoulder. “God help us,” she whispered. “We’ve arrived in Hell.”

  Lily demanded to know if that was true. Guilford assured her that it wasn’t; this was only London, new London in the new world — though it was an easy mistake to make, perhaps, with the gaudy sunset, the clanking harbor, the river monster and all.

  Stevedores undertook the unloading of the ferry. Finch, Sullivan, and the rest of the expedition put up at the Imperial, London’s biggest hotel. Guilford looked wistfully at the leaded windows and wrought-iron balconies of the building as he rode with Caroline and Lily away from the harbor. They had hired a London taxi, essentially a horsecart with a cloth roof and a feeble suspension; they were bound for the home of Caroline’s uncle, Jered Pierce. Their luggage would follow in the morning.

  A lamplighter moved through the dusky streets among boisterous crowds. There was not much left of the f
abled English decorum, Guilford thought, if this mob of sailors and loud women was any sample. London was plainly a frontier town, its population culled from the rougher elements of the Royal Fleet. There might be shortages of coal and oil, but the grog shops appeared to be doing a roaring business.

  Lily put her head on Guilford’s lap and closed her eyes. Caroline was awake and vigilant. She reached for Guilford’s hand and squeezed it. “Liam says they’re good people, but I’ve never met them,” meaning her aunt and uncle.

  “They’re family, Caroline. I’m sure they’re fine.”

  The Pierce shop stood on a brightly lit market street, but like everything else in the city it gave the impression of makeshift and ramshackle. Caroline’s uncle Jered bounded from the doorway and welcomed his niece with a hug, pumped Guilford’s hand vigorously, picked up Lily and examined her as if she were an especially satisfactory sack of flour. Then he ushered them in from the street, up a flight of iron stairs to the rooms where the Family lived above the shop. The flat was narrow and sparsely furnished, but a woodstove made it warm and Jered’s wife Alice welcomed them with another round of embraces. Guilford smiled and let Caroline do most of the talking. Landbound at last, he felt weary. Jered put a hollow log on the fire, and Guilford registered that even the smell of burning wood was different in Darwinia: the smoke was sweet and pungent, like Indian hemp or attar of roses.

  The Pierce family had been widely scattered when the Miracle struck. Caroline had been in Boston with Jered’s brother Liam; both her parents had been in England with Caroline’s dying grandfather. Jered and Alice were in Capetown, had stayed there until the troubles of 1916; in August of that year they had sailed for London with a generous loan from Liam and plans for a dry goods and hardware business. Both were hardy types, thick-bodied and strong. Guilford liked them at once.

  Lily went to bed first, in a spare room barely large enough to qualify as a closet, and Guilford and Caroline down the hallway. Their bed was a brass four-poster, immensely comfortable. The Pierce family had a more generous idea of how a mattress ought to be made than the pennypinching outfitters of the Odense. It was almost certainly the last civilized bed he would sleep in for a while, and Guilford meant to relish it; but he was unconscious as soon as he closed his eyes, and then, too soon, it was morning.

  The Finch expedition waited in London for a second shipment of supplies, including five Stone-Galloway flat-bottom boats, eighteen-footers with outboard motors, due to arrive on the next vessel from New York. Guilford spent two days in a dim customs-house conducting an inventory while Preston Finch replaced various missing or damaged items — a block and tackle, a tarpaulin, a leaf press.

  After that Guilford was free to spend time with his family. He lent a hand in the shop, watched Lily work her way through egg breakfasts, sausage suppers, and far too many sugar biscuits. He admired Jered’s Empire Volunteer Certificate, signed by Lord Kitchener himself, which held place of honor on the parlor wall. Every returned Englishman had one, but Jered took his Volunteer duties seriously and spoke without irony of rebuilding the Dominion.

  This was all interesting but it was not the Europe Guilford longed to experience — the raw new world unmediated by human intervention. He told Jered he’d like to spend a day exploring the city.

  “Not much to see, I’m afraid. Candlewick to St. Paul’s is a nice walk on a sunny day, or Thames Street beyond the wharves. Up east the roads are more mud than anything else. And stay away from the clearances.”

  “I don’t mind mud,” Guilford said. “I expect I’ll see a lot of it in the next few months.”

  Jered frowned uneasily. “I expect you’re right about that.”

  Guilford walked past the market stalls and away from the clanging harbor. The morning sun was radiant, the air blissfully cool. He encountered much horse and cart traffic but few automobiles, and the city’s civil engineering was still a work in progress. Open sewers ran through the newer neighborhoods; a reeking honeywagon rattled down Candlewick Street, drawn by two swaybacked nags. Some of the townfolk wore white handkerchiefs tied over mouth and nose, for reasons which had been obvious to Guilford since the ferry docked: the smell of the city was at times appalling, a mixture of human and animal waste, coal smoke and the stench of the pulp mill across the river.

  But it was also a lively and good-natured town, and Guilford was greeted cheerfully by other pedestrians. He stopped for lunch at a Ludgate pub and emerged refreshed into the sunlight. Beyond the new St. Paul’s the town faded into tar-paper shacks, farm clearances, finally patches of raw forest. The road became a rutted dirt path, mosque trees shaded the lane with their green coronets, and the air was suddenly much fresher.

  The generally accepted explanation for the Miracle was that it had been just that: an act of divine intervention on a colossal scale. Preston Finch believed so, and Finch was not an idiot. And on the face of it, the argument was unimpeachable. An event had taken place in defiance of everything commonly accepted as natural law; it had fundamentally transformed a generous portion of the Earth’s surface in a single night. Its only precedents were Biblical. After the conversion of Europe, who could be skeptical of the Flood, for instance, particularly when naturalists like Finch were prepared to tease evidence for it from the geological record? Man proposes, God disposes; His motives might be obscure but His handiwork was unmistakable.

  But Guilford could not stand among these gently swaying alien growths and believe they did not have a history of their own.

  Certainly Europe had been remade in 1912; just as certainly, these very trees had appeared there in a night, eight years younger than he found them now. But they did not seem new-made. They generated seed (spores, more precisely, or germinae in the new taxonomy), which implied heritage, history, descent, perhaps even evolution. Cut one of these trees across the bole and you would find annular growth rings numbering far more than eight. The annular rings might be large or small, depending on seasonal temperatures and sunlight… depending on seasons that had happened before these plants appeared on Earth.

  So where had they come from?

  He paused at the roadside where a stand of gullyflowers grew almost to shoulder height. In one cuplike bud, a threadneedle crawled among blue stamenate spikes. With each movement of the insect tiny clouds of germinal matter dusted the warm spring air. To call this “supernatural,” Guilford thought, was to contradict the very idea of nature.

  On the other hand, what limits applied to divine intervention? None, presumably. If the Creator of the Universe wanted to give one of his creations the false appearance of a history, He would simply do so; human logic was surely the least of His concerns. God might have made the world just yesterday, for that matter, assembled it out of stardust and divine will complete with the illusion of human memory. Who would know? Had Caesar or Cleopatra ever really lived? Then what about the people who vanished the night of the Conversion? If the Miracle had engulfed the entire planet rather than one part of it surely the answer would be no — no Guilford Law, no Woodrow Wilson, no Edison or Marconi; no Rome, no Greece, no Jerusalem; no Neanderthal Man. For that matter, no Adam, no Eve.

  And if that’s so, Guilford thought, then we live in a madhouse. There could be no genuine understanding of anything, ever… except perhaps in the Mind of God.

  In which case we should simply give up. Knowledge was provisional at best and science was an impracticality. But he refused to believe it.

  He was distracted from gullyflowers and philosophy by the smell of smoke. He followed the lane up a gentle hillside, to an open field where mosque and bell trees had been cut, stacked with dry brush, and set ablaze. A gang of soot-blackened workingmen stood at the verge of the road minding the fires.

  A husky man in dungarees and a sailor’s jersey — the crew boss, Guilford supposed — waved him over impatiently. “Burn’s just on, I’m afraid. Best stay behind the beaters or turn back. One or two might get past us.”

  Guilford said, “One or two wh
at?”

  This drew a chorus of laughter from the men, some half-dozen of whom carried thick wooden posts blunted at one end.

  The Crew boss said, “You’re an American?”

  Guilford acknowledged it.

  “New here?”

  “Fairly new. What is it I’m supposed to watch out for?”

  “Stump runners, for Christ’s sake. Look at you, you’re not even wearing knee boots! Keep off the clearances unless you’re dressed for it. It’s safe enough when we’re cutting and stacking, but the fires always draw ’em out. Stay behind the beaters until the flush is finished and you’ll be all right.”

  Guilford stood where the crew boss directed him, with the workmen forming a skirmish line between the road and the cleared lot. The sun was warm, the smoke chokingly thick whenever the wind reversed. Guilford had started to wonder whether the waiting would go on all afternoon when one of the laborers shouted “ ’Ware!” and faced the clearing, knees braced, his frayed wooden post at quarter-arms.

  “Buggers live in the earth,” the crew boss said. “Fire boils ’em out. You don’t want to get in the way.”

  Beyond the workers he saw motion in the charred soil of the clearing. Stump runners, if Guilford remembered correctly, were burrowing hive insects about the size of a large beetle, commonly found among the roots of older mosque trees. Seldom a problem to the casual passerby, but venomous when provoked. And fiercely toxic.

  There must have been a dozen flourishing nests in the clearance.

  The insects came from the earth in mounds and filled the smoldering spaces between the fires like shimmering black oil. The clearing yielded several distinct swarms, which turned, collided, and wheeled in every direction.

  The beaters began pounding the dirt with their posts. They pounded in unison, raising clouds of dust and ash and shouting like madmen. The crew boss took a firm grip on Guilford’s arm. “Don’t move!” he roared. “You’re safe here. They’d attack us if they could, but their first concern is moving their egg sacks away from the flames.”