Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “How do you arrive at that conclusion, Mr. Law?”

  Surely Sullivan could see for himself? “It’s all string and baling wire. Some of the bones are fresher than others. That looks like a cow’s femur, there — the joints don’t begin to match.”

  “Very good. The photographer’s eye.”

  “It doesn’t take a photographer.”

  “You’re right, of course. The anatomy is a joke. But what interests me is the rib cage, which is correctly articulated, and in particular the skull.”

  Guilford looked again. The ribs and ventral spine were clearly Darwinian; it was the standard back-to-front arrangement, the spine U-shaped, with a deep chordal notch. The skull itself was long, faintly bovine, the dome high and capacious: a cunning carnivore. “You think those are authentic?”

  “Authentic in the sense that they’re genuine bones, not papier-mâché, and obviously not mammalian. Our host claims he bought them from a settler who dug them out of a bog somewhere up the Lea, looking for something cheaper than coal to burn.”

  “Then they’re relatively recent.”

  “Relatively, though no one’s seen a living animal like it or anything remotely equivalent. Large predators are scarce on the Continent. Donnegan reported a leopard-sized carnivore from the Massif Central, but nothing bigger. So what does this fellow represent, Mr. Law? That’s the interesting question. A large, recently-extinct hunter?”

  “I hope extinct. He looks formidable.”

  “Formidable and, judging by the cranium, perhaps intelligent. As animals go. If there are any of his tribe still living, we may need those pistols Finch is so fond of. And if not—”

  “If not?”

  “Well, what does it mean to talk about an extinct species, when the continent is only eight years old?”

  Guilford decided to tread carefully. “You’re assuming the continent has a history.”

  “I’m not assuming it, I’m deducing it. Oh, it’s a familiar argument — I simply wondered where you stood.”

  “The trouble is, we have two histories. One continent, two histories. I don’t know how to reconcile them.”

  Sullivan smiled. “That’s a good first pass. Forced to guess, Mr. Law? Which is it? Elizabeth the First, or our bony friend here?”

  “I’ve thought about it, obviously, but—”

  “Don’t hedge. Take your pick.”

  “Both,” Guilford said flatly. “Somehow… both.”

  “But isn’t that impossible?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Sullivan’s smile became a grin. “Good for you.”

  So Guilford had passed a test, though the older man’s motives remained obscure. That was all right. Guilford liked Sullivan, was pleased that the botanist had chosen to treat him as an equal. Mainly, however, he was glad to step out of the taxidermist’s hut and into the daylight. Though London’s docklands didn’t smell much better.

  That night he shared his bed with Caroline for the last time.

  Last time until autumn, Guilford corrected himself, but there was small comfort in the thought. Frustratingly, she was cool toward him tonight.

  She was the only woman he had ever slept with. He had met her in the offices of Atticus and Pierce when he was touching up his plates for Rocky Mountain Fossil Shales. Guilford had felt an immediate, instinctive fondness for the aloof and frowning Pierce girl. He obtained a brief introduction from her uncle and in the following weeks began to calculate her appearances at the office: she took lunch with her uncle, a secretary told him, every Wednesday noon. Guilford intercepted her after one of these meetings and offered to walk her to the streetcar. She had accepted, looking at him from under her crown of hair like a wary princess.

  Wary and wounded. Caroline hadn’t recovered from the loss of her parents in the Miracle, but that was a common enough grief. Guilford found he could provoke a smile from her, at least now and then. In those days her silences had been more ally than enemy; they fostered a subtler communication. In that invisible language she had said something like: I’m hurt but too proud to admit it — can you help? And he had answered, I’ll make you a safe place. I’ll make you a home.

  Now he lay awake with the sound of an occasional horsecart passing in the night and a valley of cotton bedsheet between himself and the woman he loved. Was it possible to break an unspoken promise? The truth was that he hadn’t delivered Caroline to a safe place after all. He had traveled too far and too often: out west, and now here. Given her a fine daughter but brought them to this foreign shore, where he was about to abandon them… in the name of history, or science, or his own reckless dreams.

  He told himself that this was what men did, that men had been doing it for centuries and that if men didn’t do it the race would still be living in trees. But the truth was more complex, involved matters Guilford himself didn’t care to think about, perhaps contained some echo of his father, whose stolid pragmatism had been the path to an early grave.

  Caroline was asleep now, or nearly asleep. He put a hand on the slope of her hip, a gentle pressure that was meant to say But I’ll come back. She responded with a sleepy curl, almost a shrug, not quite indifferent. Perhaps.

  In the morning they were strangers to one another.

  Caroline and Lily rode with him to the docks, where the Argus was restless with the tide. Cool mists twined around the ship’s rust-pocked hull.

  Guilford hugged Caroline, feeling wordless and crude; then Lily clambered up into his arms, pressed her soft cheek against his and said, “Come back soon.”

  Guilford promised he would.

  Lily, at least, believed him.

  Then he walked up the gangway, turned at the rail to wave goodbye, but his wife and daughter were already lost among the crowd that thronged the wharf. As quick as that, Guilford thought. As quick as that.

  Argus made her passage across the Channel in a fog. Guilford brooded belowdecks until the sun broke through and John Sullivan demanded that he come up to see the continent by morning light.

  What Guilford saw was a dense green wetland combed by a westerly wind — the saltwater marshes at the vast mouth of the Rhine. Stromatolites rose like unearthly monuments, and flute trees had colonized the delta everywhere the silt rose high enough to support their spidery roots. The steam packet followed a shallow but weed-free channel — slowly, because soundings were crude and the silt often shifted after a storm — toward a denser, greener distance. Jeffersonville was a faint plume of smoke on the flat green horizon, then a smudge, then a brown aggregation of shacks built into reed-stalk hummocks or perched on stilts where the ground was firm enough, and everywhere crude docks and small boats and the reek of salt, fish, refuse, and human waste. Caroline had thought London was primitive; Guilford was thankful she hadn’t seen Jeffersonville. The town was like a posted warning: here ends civilization. Beyond this point, the anarchy of Nature.

  There were plenty of fishing boats, canoes, and what looked like rafts cobbled from Darwinian timber, all clotting the net-draped wharves, but only one other vessel as large as the Argus, an American gunship anchored and flying her colors. “That’s our ride upriver,” Sullivan said, standing alongside Guilford at the rail. “We won’t be here long. Finch will make obeisance to the Navy while we hire ourselves a pathfinder.”

  “We?” Guilford asked.

  “You and I. Then you can set up your lenses. Capture us all at the dock. Embarkation at Jeffersonville. Should make a stirring photograph.” Sullivan clapped him on the back. “Cheer up, Mr. Law. This is the real new world, and you’re about to set foot on it.”

  But there was little firm footing here in the marshes. You kept to the boardwalks or risked being swallowed up. Guilford wondered how much of Darwinia would be like this — the blue sky, the combing wind, the quiet threat.

  Sullivan notified Finch that he and Guilford were going to hire a guide. Guilford was lost as soon as the wharves were out of sight, hidden by fishermen’s shacks and a tall stand of m
osque trees. But Sullivan seemed to know where he was going. He had been here in 1918, he said, cataloging some of the marshland species. “I know the town, though it’s bigger now, and I met a few of the old hands.”

  The people they passed looked rough-hewn and dangerous. The government had begun handing out homestead grants and paid passage not long after the Miracle, but it took a certain kind of person to volunteer for frontier life, even in those difficult days. Not a few of them had been fugitives from the law.

  They lived by fishing and trapping and their wits. Judging by the visible evidence, fresh water and soap were in short supply. Men and women alike wore rough clothing and had let their hair grow long and tangled. Despite which, several of these shabby individuals looked at Sullivan and Guilford with the amused contempt of a native for a tourist.

  “We’re going to see a man named Tom Compton,” Sullivan said. “Best tracker in Jeffersonville, assuming he isn’t dead or out in the bush.”

  Tom Compton lived in a wooden hut away from the water. Sullivan didn’t knock but barged through the half-open door — Darwinian manners, perhaps. Guilford followed cautiously. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness he found the hut sparse and clean-smelling, the plank floor dressed with a cotton rug, the walls hung with various kinds of fishing and hunting tackle. Tom Compton sat placidly in one corner of the single room, a large man with a vast, knotted beard. His skin was dark, his race obviously mixed. He wore a chain of claws around his neck. His shirt was woven of some coarse local fiber, but his trousers appeared to be conventional denim, half-hidden by high waterproof boots. He blinked at his visitors without enthusiasm and took a long-stemmed pipe from the table by his elbow.

  “Bit early for that, isn’t it?” Sullivan asked.

  Tom Compton struck a wooden match and applied it to the bowl of the pipe. “Not when I see you.”

  “You know why I’m here, Tom?”

  “I’ve heard rumors.”

  “We’re traveling inland.”

  “Doesn’t concern me.”

  “I’d like you to come with us.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “We’re crossing the Alps.”

  “I’m not interested.” He passed the pipe to Sullivan, who took it and inhaled the smoke. Not tobacco, Guilford thought. Sullivan passed the pipe to him, and Guilford looked at it with dismay. Could he politely refuse, or was this something like a Cherokee summit meeting, a smoke instead of a handshake?

  Tom Compton laughed. Sullivan said, “It’s the dried leaves of a river plant. Mildly intoxicating, but hardly opium.”

  Guilford took the gnarly briar. The smoke tasted the way a root cellar smells. He lost most of it to a coughing fit.

  “New hand,” Tom Compton said. “He doesn’t know the country.”

  “He’ll learn.”

  “They all learn,” the frontiersman said. “Everybody learns. If the country doesn’t kill ’em first.”

  Tom Compton’s pipe smoke made Guilford feel lighter and simpler. Events slowed to a crawl or leaped forward without interval. By the time he found his bunk aboard the Argus he was able to remember only fragments of the day.

  He remembered following Dr. Sullivan and Tom Compton to a wharfside tavern where brown beer was served in steins made from the boles of dried flute reeds. The steins were porous and would begin to leak if you let them sit too long. It encouraged a style of drinking not conducive to clarity of thought. There had been food, too, a Darwinian fish draped across the plate like a limp black stingray. It tasted of salt and mud; Guilford ate sparingly.

  They argued about the expedition. The frontiersman was scornful, insisting the journey was only an excuse to show the flag and express American claims to the hinterland. “You said yourself, this man Finch is an idiot.”

  “He’s a clergyman, not a scientist; he just doesn’t know the difference. But he’s no idiot. He rescued three men from the water at Cataract Canyon — carried a man with double pleurisy safely to Lee’s Ferry. That was ten years ago, but I’m sure he’d do the same tomorrow. He planned and provisioned this expedition and I would trust him with my life.”

  “Follow him into the deep country, you are trusting him with your life.”

  “So I am. I couldn’t ask for a better companion. I could ask for a better scientist — but even there, Finch has his uses. There’s a certain climate of opinion in Washington that frowns on science in general: we couldn’t predict and can’t explain the Miracle, and in certain people’s minds that’s the next thing to responsibility. Idols with feet of clay fare badly in the public budget. But we can hold up Finch to Congress as a sterling example of so-called reverential science, not a threat to home or pulpit. We go to the hinterland, we learn a few things — and frankly, the more we learn, the shakier Finch’s academic position becomes.”

  “You’re being used. Like Donnegan. Sure, you collect a few samples. But the money people want to know how far the Partisans have come, whether there’s coal in the Ruhr valley or iron in Lorraine…”

  “And if we reconnoiter the Partisans or spot some anthracite — does it matter? These things will happen whether we cross the Alps or not. At least this way we gain a little knowledge from the bargain.”

  Tom Compton turned to Guilford. “Sullivan thinks this continent is a riddle he can solve. That’s a brave and stupid idea.”

  Sullivan persisted. “You’ve been farther inland than most trappers, Tom.”

  “Not as far as all that.”

  “You know what to expect.”

  “Go far enough, no one knows what to expect.”

  “Still, you’ve had experience.”

  “More than you.”

  “Your skills would be invaluable.”

  “I have better things to do.”

  They drank in silence for a while. Another round of beer gave the conversation a philosophical bent. The frontiersman confronted Guilford, his weathered brown face ferocious as a bear’s muzzle. “Why are you here, Mr. Law?”

  “I’m a photographer,” Guilford said. He wished he had his camera with him; he wanted to photograph Tom Compton. This sun-wrinkled, beard-engulfed wild animal.

  “I know what you do,” the frontiersman said. “Why are you here?”

  To further his career. To make a name for himself. To bring back images trapped in glass and silver, of river pools and mountain meadows no human eye had seen. “I don’t know,” he heard himself say. “Curiosity, I guess.”

  Tom Compton squinted at Guilford as if he had confessed to leprosy. “People come here to get away from something, Mr. Law, or to hunt for something. To make a little money or maybe even, like Sullivan here, to learn something. But the I don’t knows — those are the dangerous ones.”

  One other memory came to Guilford as he was lulled to sleep by the rocking of Argus on the rising tide: Sullivan and Tom Compton talking about the back country, the frontiersman full of warnings: the new continent’s rivers had cut their own beds, not always according to the old maps, the wildlife was dangerous, the forage so difficult that without provisions you might as well be crossing a desert. There were unnamed fevers, often fatal. And as for crossing the Alps: well, Tom said, some few trappers and hunters had thought of crossing by the old St. Gothard route; it wasn’t a new idea. But tales came back, ghost stories, rumors — plain nonsense, Sullivan said scornfully — and maybe so, but enough to make a sane man reconsider… which excludes you, Sullivan said, and Tom grinned hugely and said, you too, you old madman, leaving Guilford to wonder what unspoken agreement had been reached between the two men and what might be waiting for them in the deep interior of this huge and chartless land.

  Chapter Six

  England at last, Colin Watson thought: but it wasn’t really England at all, was it? The Canadian cargo vessel steamed up the broad estuary of the Thames, its prow cutting into tidal waters the color of green tea: tropical, at least this time of year. Like visiting Bombay or Bihar. Certainly not like coming home.

&n
bsp; He thought of the cargo rocking in the holds below. Coal from South Africa, India, Australia, a precious commodity in this age of rebellion and the fraying Empire. Tools and dies from Canada. And hundreds of crated Lee-Enfield rifles from the factory in Alberta, all bound for Kitchener’s Folly, New London, making a safe place in the wilderness, for the day when an English king was restored to an English throne.

  The rifles were Watson’s responsibility. As soon as the ship was moored at the primitive docks he ordered his men — a few Sikhs and grumbling Canadians — to cinch and lift the pallets, while he went ashore to sign manifests for the Port Authority. The heat was stifling, and this crude wooden town was not by any stretch of the imagination London. And yet to be here brought home the reality of the Conversion of Europe, which for Watson had been a faraway event, as strange and as inherently implausible as a fairy tale, except that so many had indisputably died.

  Certainly this wasn’t the country he had sailed from a decade ago. He had graduated from public school without merit and taken training from the Officer Corps at Woolwich: exchanged one barracks for another, Latin declensions for artillery maneuvers. In his naïveté he had expected G.A. Henty, a dignified heroism, Ndebele rebels fleeing the point of his sword. He had arrived instead at a dusty barracks in Cairo overseeing a rabble of bored infantrymen, until that night when the sky lit up with coruscating fire and the quaking earth shook down the British Protectorate in Egypt, among so many other things. An aimless enough life, but there had been the consolations of friendship and strong drink or, more tenuously, of God and Country, until 1912 made it clear that God was a cipher and that if He existed at all He must surely have despised the English.

  Britain’s remaining military power had been concentrated on shoring up her possessions in India and South Africa. Southern Rhodesia had fallen, Salisbury burning like an autumn bonfire; Egypt and Sudan were lost to the Moslem rebels. Watson had been rescued from the hostile ruins of Cairo and placed on a hideously crowded troop transport bound for Canada. He spent months in a relocation barracks in the tall-timber country of British Columbia, was transferred at last to a prairie town where Kitchener’s government-in-exile had established a small-arms factory.