Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The Weston anchored in mid-river. Guilford, newly mended though still somewhat weak, went ashore to help Sullivan collect fingerwort and a dozen other meadow species. The voucher specimens were prepared between the frames of Sullivan’s plant-press, the dried flats layered into a box wrapped in oilcloth. Sullivan showed him a particularly vivid orange flower common along the sandy shore. “For all its structure, it might be cousin to an English poppy. But these flowers are male, Mr. Law. Insects disperse pollen by literally devouring the stamens. The female flower — here’s one: you see? — is hardly a flower at all in the conventional sense. More like a thread dipped in honey. One immense pistil, with a Ciliate structure to carry the male pollen to the gynoecium. Insects are often trapped on it, and pollen with them. The pattern is common in Darwinia, non-existent among terrestrial plants. The physical resemblance is real but coincidental. As if the same process of evolution had acted through different channels — like this river, which approximates the Rhine in general but not in the specific. It drains roughly the same highlands to roughly the same ocean, but its elbows and meanders are entirely unpredictable.”

  And its whirlpools, Guilford thought, and its rapids, though the river had been gentle enough so far. Did the river of evolution pose similar hazards?

  Sullivan, Gillvany, Finch and Robinson ruled the daylight hours — Digby, the expedition’s cook, called them “Plants and Ants, Stones and Bones.” Night belonged to Keck, Tuckinan and Burke, surveyors and navigators, with their sextants and stars and maps by lamplight. Guilford enjoyed asking Keck exactly where the expedition was, because his answers were inevitably strange and wonderful. “We’re entering the Cologne Embayment, Mr. Law, and we’d be seeing Düsseldorf before long, if the world hadn’t been turned on its head.”

  Weston anchored in a broad, slow turn of the river T. Compton calls Cathedral Pool. Rhine flows from a gentle rift valley, mountainous Bergischland east of us, the Rhine Gorge somewhere ahead. Generously forested terrain: mosque trees (taller than English spp.), immense khaki-colored sage-pine, complex undergrowth. Fire perhaps a threat in dry weather. This was brown coal territory in the other Europe; Compton says wildcatters have been spotted here shallow mines already operating (marginally), and we have seen crude roads a little river traffic. Finch claims to find evidence of coking coal, says this area will be an iron and steel center someday, God willing, with pig iron from the Oolitic scarps of the Cotes de Moselle, esp. if U.S. keeps continent from being “fenced with borders.”

  Sullivan says coal is more evidence of an ancient Darwinia, a stratigraphic sequence caused by the Tertiary uplift of the Rhine Plateau. Real question, he says, is whether Darwinian geology is identical to old European geology, changes due solely to different weathering and river meanders; or whether Darwinian geology is only approximately the same, different in its finer points — which may affect our survey of the Alps: an unexpected gorge at Mount Genevre or Brenner would send us chastened back to J’ville.

  Weather fine, blue skies, the river current stronger now.

  It couldn’t last, Guilford knew, this leisurely river cruise, with a well-stocked galley and long days with the camera and plant-press, graveled beaches free of troublesome insects or animals, nights as rich with stars as any Guilford had seen in Montana. The Weston moved farther up the rift valley of the Rhine and the gorge walls grew steeper, the scraps more dramatic, until it was easy for Guilford to imagine the old Europe here, the vanished castles (“Eberbach,” Keck would intone, “Marksburg, Sooneck, Kaiserpfalz…”), massed Teutonic warriors with spikes and tassles on their helmets.

  But this was not Old Europe and the evidence was everywhere: thornfish fluttering in the shallows, the cinammon reek of sage-pine forests (neither sage nor pine but a tall tree that grew branches in a spiral terrace), the night cries of creatures yet unnamed. Human beings had been this way — Guilford saw the occasional passing raft, plus evidence of tow-ropes, trappers’ huts, woodsmoke, fish weirs — but only very recently.

  And there was, he found, a kind of comfort in the emptiness of the country enfolded around him, his own terrible and wonderful anonymity in it, making footprints where no footprints had been and knowing that the land would soon erase them. The land demanded nothing, gave nothing more than itself.

  But the easy days couldn’t last. The Rheinfelden was ahead. The Weston would have to turn back. And then, Guilford thought, we’ll see what it means, to be truly alone, in all this unknown world of rock and forest.

  The Rheinfelden Cascade, or Rhine River Falls, head of navigation. This is as far as Tom Compton has been. Some trappers, he says, claim to have portaged as far as Lake Constance. But trappers are inclined to boast.

  The falls are not spectacular by comparison to, say, Niagara, but they gate the river quite effectively. Mist hangs heavy, a great pale thunderhead above the sweating rocks forested hills. Water a fast green flow, sky darkening with rain clouds, every rock and crevice invaded by a moss-like plant with delicate white blooms.

  Having observed photographed the cascade we retreat to a point of portage. Tom Compton knows of a local fur breeder who might be willing to sell us animals for pack.

  Postscriptum to Caroline Lily: Miss you both greatly, feel as if I’m talking to you in these pages even though I am very far away — deep in the Lost (or New) Continent, strangeness on every horizon.

  The fur breeder turned out to be a truculent German-American who called himself “Erasmus” and who had corralled for breeding, on a crude farm a distance from the river, an enormous herd of fur snakes.

  Fur snakes, Sullivan explained, were the continent’s most exploitable resource, at least for now. Herbivorous herd animals, they were common in the upland meadows and probably throughout the eastern steppes; Donnegan had encountered them in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which suggested they were widely distributed. Guilford was fascinated and spent much of the remainder of the day at Erasmus’s kraal, despite the pervasive odor, which was one of the fur snakes’ less attractive points.

  The animals resembled, Guilford thought, not so much snakes as grubs — bloated, pale “faces” with cow-like eyes, cylindrical bodies, six legs obscured under ropes of matted hair. As a resource they were a virtual Sears-Roebuck catalog: fur for clothing, hides for tanning, fat for tallow, and a bland but edible meat. Snake furs were the Rhine’s staple of commerce, and snake fur, Sullivan asserted, had even made an appearance in New York fashion circles. Guilford supposed the smell didn’t survive the shearing, or who would want such a coat, even in a New York winter?

  More important, the fur snakes made workable pack animals, without which the survey of the Alps would be a great deal more difficult. Preston Finch had already retired to Erasmus’ hut to negotiate for the purchase of fifteen or twenty of the animals. And Erasmus must drive a hard bargain, since by the time Diggs had his mess tent set up Finch and Erasmus were still bargaining — raised voices were audible.

  At last Finch stormed out of the sod hut, ignoring dinner. “Horrible man,” he muttered. “Partisan sympathizer. This is hopeless.”

  The Navy pilot and crew remained aboard the Weston, preparing to sail back down the Rhine with specimens, collections, field notes, letters home. Guilford sat with Sullivan, Keck, and the frontiersman Tom Compton on a bluff above the river, enjoying plates of Digby’s reconstituted corned-beef hash and watching the sun wester.

  “The trouble with Preston Finch,” Sullivan said, “is that he doesn’t know how to yield a point.”

  “Nor does Erasmus,” Tom Compton said. “He’s not a Partisan, just a general-purpose jackass. Spent three years in Jeffersonville brokering hides, but nobody could tolerate the man’s company for long. He’s not made for human companionship.”

  “The animals are interesting,” Guilford said. “Like thoats, in the Burroughs novel. Martian mules.”

  “Well then maybe you should take a picture of ’em,” Tom Compton said, and rolled his eyes.

  By morning it w
as obvious negotiations had collapsed altogether. Finch wouldn’t speak to Erasmus, though he begged the pilot of the Weston to hold up at least another day. Sullivan, Gillvany, and Robinson went specimen-collecting in the forests near Erasmus’ grazing pastures, obviously hoping the issue would by some miracle be settled before they returned to camp. And Guilford set up his camera by the kraal.

  Which brought Erasmus stomping out of his lopsided sod hut like an angry dwarf. Guilford had not had any personal introduction to the herder and he tried to refrain from flinching.

  Erasmus — not much above five foot tall, his face lost in Biblical curls of beard, dressed in patched denim overalls and a snakeskin serape, stopped a careful distance from Guilford, frowning and breathing noisily. Guilford nodded politely and went about the business of adjusting his tripod. Let the Old Man of the Mountain make the first move.

  It took time, but Erasmus eventually spoke. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

  “Photographing the animals, if that’s all right.”

  “You might have asked first.”

  Guilford didn’t respond. Erasmus breathed a few minutes more, then. “So that’s a camera, is it?”

  “Yes sir,” Guilford said, “a Kodak plate camera.”

  “You take plate photos? Like in National Geographic?”

  “Just about exactly like.”

  “You know that magazine — National Geographic?”

  “I’ve worked for it.”

  “Eh? When?”

  “Last year. Deep Creek Canyon. Montana.”

  “Those were your pictures? December 1919?”

  Guilford gave the snake herder a longer look. “Are you a member of the Society, Mr., uh, Erasmus?”

  “Just call me Erasmus. You?”

  “Guilford Law.”

  “Well, Mr. Guilford Law, I’m not a member of the National Geographic Society, but the magazine comes upriver once in a while. I take it in trade. Reading material is hard to come by. I have your photographs.” He hesitated. “These pictures of my stock — they’ll be published?”

  “Perhaps,” Guilford said. “I don’t make those decisions.”

  “I see.” Erasmus pondered the possibilities. Then he drew in a great gulp of the heavy kraal air. “Would you care to come back to my cabin, Guilford Law? Now that Finch is gone, maybe we can talk.”

  Guilford admired the snake farmer’s collection of National Geographic stacked on a wooden shelf — fifteen issues in all, most of them water-stained and dog-eared, some held together with binding twine, sharing space with equally tattered obscene postcards, cheap Westerns, and a recent Argosy Guilford hadn’t seen. He praised the meager library and said nothing about the pressed-earth floor, the reek of crudely cured hides, the oven-like heat and dim light, or the filthy trestle table decorated with evidence of meals long finished.

  At Erasmus’ prodding Guilford reminisced for a time about Deep Creek Canyon, the Gallatin River, Walcott’s tiny fossil crustaceans: crayfish from the siliceous shale, unbelievably ancient, unless you accepted Finch’s caveats about the age of the Earth. The irony was that Erasmus, an old Darwinian hand who had been born in Milwaukee and lived downstream from the alien Rheinfelden, found the idea of Montana creek beds intensely exotic.

  Talk drifted at last to the subject of Preston Finch. “Don’t mean to offend,” Erasmus said, “but he’s a pompous blowhard, and that’s that. Wants twenty head of snake at ten dollars a head, if you can imagine such a thing.”

  “The price isn’t fair?”

  “Oh, the price is fair — more than fair, actually; that’s not the problem.”

  “You don’t want to sell twenty head?”

  “Sure I do. Twenty head at that price would keep me through the winter.”

  “Then, if I may ask, what’s the problem?”

  “Finch! Finch is the problem! He comes into my home with his nose in the air and talks to me like I’m a child. Finch! I wouldn’t sell Preston Finch a road apple for a fortune if I was starving.”

  Guilford considered the impasse. “Erasmus,” he said finally, “we can do more and go farther with those animals than without. The more successful the survey, the more likely you are to see my photographs in print. Maybe even in the Geographic.”

  “My animals?”

  “Your animals and you yourself, if you’re willing to pose.”

  The snake breeder stroked his beard. “Well. Well. I might pose. But it makes no difference. I won’t sell my animals to Finch.”

  “I understand. What if I asked you to sell them to me?”

  Erasmus blinked and slowly smiled. “Then maybe we have the making of a bargain. But look, Guilford Law, there’s more to it. The animals will carry your boats above the Falls and you can probably follow the river as far as the Bodensee, but if you want pack animals into the Alps someone will have to herd them from above the falls to the shore of the lake.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I’ve done it before. Lot of herds winter there. That’s where most of my stock comes from. I would be willing to do it for you, sure — for a price.”

  “I’m not authorized to negotiate, Erasmus.”

  “Bullshit. Let’s talk terms. Then you can go dicker with the treasury or whatever you have to do.”

  “All right… but one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Are you willing to part with that Argosy on your shelf?”

  “Eh? No. Hardly. Not unless you have something to trade for it.”

  Well, Guilford thought, maybe Dr. Farr wouldn’t miss his copy of Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy.

  Erasmus’ farm below the Rheinfelden. His kraal, the fur snakes. Erasmus with his herd. Storm clouds rising in the NW; Tom Compton predicts rain.

  Postscriptum. With the aid of our “Martian mules” we will be able to portage the folding motor-launches — clever light constructions, white oak and Michigan pine, sixteen-footers with watertight storage and detachable skags — and travel above the cascades probably as far as Lake Constance (which Erasmus calls the Bodensee). All that we have collected and learned to date sails back to J’ville with the Weston.

  Preston Finch I think resentful of my parley with Erasmus — he looks at me from under his solar topee like an irritable Jehovah — but Tom Compton seems impressed: he is at least willing to speak to me lately, not just suffer my presence on Sullivan’s account. Even offered me a draw on his notorious spittle-drenched pipe, which I politely declined, though perhaps that put us back to Square One — he has taken to waving his oilcloth bag of dried leaf at me laughing in a manner not altogether flattering.

  We march in the morning if weather is at all reasonable. Home seems farther away than ever, the land grows stranger by the day.

  Chapter Nine

  Caroline adjusted to the rhythms of her uncle Jered’s household, strange as those rhythms were. Like London, or most of the world these days, there was something provisional about her uncle’s home. He kept odd hours. Often it was left to Alice (and more often now, Caroline herself) to mind the store. She found herself learning the uses of nuts and bolts, of winches and penny nails and quicklime. And there was the mildly entertaining enigma of Colin Watson, who slept on a cot in the storeroom and crept in and out of the building like a restless spirit. Periodically he would take an evening meal at the Pierce table, where he was faultlessly polite but about as talkative as a brick. He was gaunt, not gluttonous, and he blushed easily, Caroline thought, for a soldier. Jered’s table talk was sometimes coarse.

  Lily had adjusted easily enough to her new environment, less easily to the absence of her father. She still asked from time to time where Daddy was. “Across the English Channel,” Caroline told her, “where no one has been before.”

  “Is he safe?”

  “Very safe. And very brave.”

  Lily asked about her father most often at bedtime. It was Guilford who had always read to her, a ritual that left Caroline feeling faintly and un
reasonably jealous. Guilford read to Lily with a wholeheartedness Caroline couldn’t match, distrustful as she was of the books Lily liked, their unwholesome preoccupation with fairies and monsters. But Caroline took up the task in his absence, mustering as much enthusiasm as she could. Lily needed the reassurance of a story before she could wholly relax, abandon vigilance, sleep.

  Caroline envied the simplicity of the ritual. Too often, she carried her own burden of doubt well into the morning hours.

  Still, the summer nights were warm and the air rich with a fragrance that was, though strange, not entirely unpleasant. Certain native plants, Jered said, blossomed only at night. Caroline imagined alien poppies, heavy-headed, narcotic. She learned to leave her bedroom window open and let the flowered breezes play over her face. She learned, as the summer progressed, to sleep more easily.

  It was Lily’s sleeplessness, as July waned, that served as notice that something had changed in Jered’s house.

  Lily with dark bands beneath her eyes. Lily picking dazedly at breakfast. Lily silent and grim at the dinner table, cringing away from Caroline’s uncle.

  Caroline found herself unwilling to ask what was wrong — wanting nothing to be wrong, hating the idea of yet another crisis. She summoned her courage one warm night after another chapter of “Dorothy,” as Lily called these repetitious fables, when Lily was still restless.