Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Guilford threw a coil of rope into the water where Gillvany had disappeared, but the entomologist was gone — vanished into the quick green water and away, no wake or eddy to mark his passage.

  Then Perspicacity struck the rocks and heeled up under the fierce pressure of the Rhine, Guilford clinging to an oarlock with all the strength that was left in him.

  Above the unnamed rapids, stranded for two days now. Perspicacity under repair. Skag and screw can be replaced from spares.

  Tom Gillvany cannot.

  Postscriptum. I did not know Tom Gillvany well. He was a quiet, studious man. According to Dr. Sullivan, a scholar respected in his field. Lost to the river. We searched downstream but could not recover his body. I will remember his shy smile, his sobriety, and his unashamed fascination with the New Continent.

  We all mourn his passing. The mood is grim.

  A hollow where the Rhine gorge is rocky and steep, a sort of natural cavern, shallow but tall as a church: Cathedral Cavern, Preston Finch has named it. Cairn of stone to honor Dr. Gillvany. Driftwood marker with legend inscribed by Keck with a rock hammer, In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany, and the date.

  Postscriptum. Silent as we are, there is not much to hear: the river, the wind (rain has closed us in once more), Diggs humming Rock of Ages as he stokes the fire.

  We have been bloodied by this land.

  Tomorrow, if all goes well, we launch again. And onward. I miss my wife and child.

  Because he could not sleep, Guilford left his tent after midnight and navigated past the embers of the fire to the mouth of the cave, outlined in steely moonlight, where Sullivan sat with a small brass telescope, peering into the night sky. The rain had passed. Mare’s-tail clouds laced the moon. Most of the sky above the Rhine gorge was bright with stars. Guilford cleared his throat and made a space for himself amidst the rock and sand.

  The older man looked at him briefly. “Hello, Guilford. Mind the billyflies. Though they’re sparse tonight. They don’t like the wind.”

  “Are you an astronomer as well as a botanist, Dr. Sullivan?”

  “Strictly an amateur stargazer. And I’m looking at a planet, actually, not a star.”

  Guilford asked which planet had attracted Sullivan’s attention.

  “Mars,” the botanist said.

  “The red planet,” Guilford said, which was just about the sum of his knowledge concerning that heavenly body, except that it possessed two moons and had been the subject of some fine writing by Burroughs and the Englishman, Wells.

  “Less red than it once was,” Sullivan said. “Mars has darkened since the Miracle.”

  “Darkened?”

  “Mars has seasons, Guilford, just like Earth. The ice caps retreat in summer, the darker areas expand. The planet appears reddish because it is probably a desert of oxidized iron. But lately the red is palliated. Lately,” he said, bracing the telescope against his knee, “there are shades of blue. The shift has been measured spectrographically; the eye is a little less sensitive.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Sullivan shrugged. “No one knows.”

  Guilford peered into the moon-silvered sky. The Conversion of Europe was mystery enough. Daunting to think of another planet grown similarly wild and strange. “May I use the telescope, Dr. Sullivan? I’d like to see Mars myself.”

  He would look the mystery in the eye: he was that brave, at least.

  But Mars was only a swimming point of light, lost in the Darwinian heavens, and the wind was chill and Dr. Sullivan was not talkative, and after a time Guilford went back to his tent and slept restlessly until morning.

  Chapter Twelve

  The end product of fear, fear not baseless but without any tangible object, was anesthesia. Each new omen seemed bleaker, until bleakness became the landscape through which Caroline must toil, eyes averted, registering nothing. Or at least as little as possible.

  She told her aunt that Lily was having trouble sleeping. Alice turned and looked absently into the depths of the dry goods store, past rows of stitched white grain bags, into a latticework of sunbeams from the high rear window. She wiped her hands on her apron. “Jered comes in at odd hours. He may have disturbed her, walking down the hall. I’ll speak to him.”

  The secret was kept, she was not privy to it, and Caroline was privately relieved. Lily slept better after that, though she had picked up nervous tics in the absence of her father: tugging her lower lip until it was sore, twining her hair around her fingers. She hated to be left alone.

  Colin Watson continued to haunt the house, a smoky presence. Caroline tried to draw him in to conversation but he said little about his life or work; only that the Service seemed to have forgotten him, that he had few duties to perform save rounds of guard duty at the Armory: he had been misplaced, he seemed to suggest, in Kitchener’s obsessive shuffling of the British forces. He couldn’t say why there were so many soldiers in London these days. “It’s like a plague,” Caroline said, but the Lieutenant wouldn’t be provoked. He only smiled.

  Soldiers and warships. Caroline hated to go down to the harbor now; most of the British Navy seemed to have anchored there in the last few weeks, battered dreadnaughts bristling with guns. The women in the market street talked about war.

  War with whom, for what purpose, Caroline couldn’t fathom. It might have something to do with the Partisans, the returned dregs of Europe, their ridiculous claims and threats; or the Americans or the Japanese or — she tried not to pay attention.

  “I miss Daddy,” Lily announced. It was Sunday. The dry-goods store was closed; Jered and Alice were taking inventory and Caroline had brought Lily to the river, to the blue river under a hot blue sky, to watch the sailing ships or see a river monster. Lily liked the silt snakes as much as Caroline hated them. Their great necks, their cold black eyes.

  “Daddy will come back soon,” she told her daughter, but Lily only frowned, hardened against consolation. Faith is a virtue, Caroline thought, but nothing is certain. Nothing. We pretend, for the sake of children.

  How perfect Lily was, sitting splay-legged on a log bench with her doll in her lap. “Lady” was the doll’s name. “Lady, Lady,” Lily sang to herself, a two-note song. The doll’s flesh-colored paint had been worn down to bone porcelain on her cheeks and forehead. “Lady, dance,” Lily sang.

  It was at that moment, an uneasy peace brief as the tolling of a bell, that Caroline saw Jered hurrying down a log-paved embankment toward her. Her heart skipped abeat. Something was wrong. She could see the trouble in his eyes, in his walk. Without thinking, she put her hands on Lily’s shoulders; Lily said, “That hurts!”

  Jered stood before her breathlessly. “I wanted to talk to you, Caroline,” he said, “before you saw the Times.”

  He was patient and compassionate, but in the end Caroline remembered it as if she had read it in the brutal cadences of a newspaper headline:

  PARTISANS ATTACK U.S. STEAMER

  “Weston” Returns Damaged to Jeffersonville,

  and then, more terrifying:

  Fate of Finch Expedition Unknown.

  But these were only naked facts. Far worse was the knowledge that Guilford was beyond her help, impossibly far away, possibly injured, possibly dead. Guilford dead in the wilderness and Caroline and Lily alone.

  She asked her uncle the awful question. “Is he dead?” she whispered, while the earth twisted under her feet and Lily ran to the bench where Lady had been abandoned, eyelids drooping, with her skirt hiked over her head.

  “Caroline, no one knows. But the ships were attacked well after they put the expedition ashore at the Rheinfelden. There’s no reason to believe Guilford has been hurt.”

  They will all lie to me now, Caroline thought: make me a widow and tell me he’s fine. She turned her face to the sky, and the sunlight through her eyelids was the color of blood.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For the purpose of the séance they drove to Eugene Randall’s apartment, a sad widower
’s digs in Virginia, one wall a shrine to his deceased spouse Louisa Ellen. Stepping inside was like stepping into the archaeology of a life, decades reduced to potsherds and clay tablets.

  Randall kept the lights low and proceeded directly to the liquor cabinet. “I don’t want to be drunk,” he explained. “I just don’t want to be sober.”

  “I could use a shot myself,” Elias Vale said.

  Inevitably, Vale lost himself to his god.

  He thought of it as “summoning” the god, but in fact it was Vale who was summoned, Vale who was used. He had never volunteered for this duty. He had never been given a choice. If he had resisted… but that didn’t bear thinking about.

  Randall wanted to speak to his lost Louisa Ellen, the horse-faced woman in the photographs, and Vale made a show of calling to her across the Great Barrier, eyes rolled to conceal his own agony. In fact he was retreating into himself, stepping out of the god’s path, becoming passive. No longer his, the need to draw breath, the rebellious tides of bile and blood.

  He was only distantly conscious of Randall’s halfhearted questions, though the emotional gist of it was painfully obvious. Randall, the lifelong rationalist, wanted desperately to believe he could speak to Louisa Ellen, who had been carried off by a vicious pneumonia less than a year ago; but he couldn’t easily abandon a lifetime’s habit of thought. So he asked questions only she could answer, wanting proof but terrified that he might not get it.

  And Vale, for the first time, felt another presence in addition to his god. This one was a tortured, partial entity — a shell of suffering that might actually once have been Louisa Ellen Randall.

  Her voice choked out of Vale’s larynx. His god modulated the tone.

  Yes, Vale said, she remembered that summer in Maine, long before the Miracle of the New Europe, a cottage by the sea, and it had rained, hadn’t it, all that cool July, but that had not made her unhappy, only grateful for beach walks whenever the clouds abated, for the fire in the hearth at night, for her collection of chalky seashells, for the patchwork quilt and the feather bed.

  And so on.

  And when Randall, florid with the pulse of blood through his clotted veins, asked. “Louisa, it is you, isn’t it?” — Vale said yes. When he asked, “Are you happy?” — Vale said, “Of course.” Here his voice faltered fractionally, because the Louisa Ellen Randall in his mind screamed out her suffering and her hatred for the god that had abducted her, who brought her here unwilling from— from—

  But these were the Mysteries.

  It was not Louisa Ellen’s voice (though it still sounded like hers) when Randall’s flagging skepticism began to recover and Vale’s god delivered a sort of coup de grâce, an oracle, a prophecy: a warning to Randall that the Finch expedition was doomed and that Randall should protect himself from the political consequences. “The Partisans have already fired on the Weston,” Vale said, and Randall blanched and stared.

  It was a concise and miraculous prophecy. The wire services featured the story the following night. It ran under banner headlines in the Washington papers.

  Vale neither knew nor cared about all that. His god had left him, that was the welcome fact. His aching body was his own again, and there was enough liquor in the house to keep him in a therapeutic oblivion.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lake Constance. The Bodensee.

  It was not much more, geographically speaking, than a wide place in the river. But in the morning mist it might have been a great placid ocean, gentle as silk, fresh sunlight cutting through the fog in silver sheets. The northern shore, just visible, was a rocky abeyance thick with silent forest, mosque trees and sage-pine and stands of a broad-leafed, white-boled tree for which not even Tom Compton had a name. Moth-hawks swept over the shimmering water in rotating swarms.

  “More than a thousand years ago,” Avery Keck said, “there was a Roman fort along these shores.” Keck, who had taken Gillvany’s place in the Perpicacity, spoke over the ragged syncopation of the boat’s small motor. “In the Middle Ages it was one of the most powerful cities in Europe. A Lombard city, on the trade route between Germany and Italy. Now it might never have existed. Only water. Only rocks.”

  Guilford wondered aloud what had happened to the vanished Europeans. Had they simply died? Or could they have traveled to a mirror-Earth, in which Europe survived intact and the rest of the world had gone feral and strange?

  Keck was a gaunt man of about forty years, with the face of a small-town undertaker. He looked at Guilford dolefully. “If so, then the Europeans have their own fresh wilderness to hack and gouge at and go to war over. Just like us, God help ’em.”

  Camp at Bodensee. Diggs at his fire. Sullivan, Betts, Hemphill at their tents. Meadow green with a small leafy spreading plant like turquoise clover. High overcast, cool gusty wind.

  Postscriptum. Or perhaps I should stop pretending these notes are “postscripts” admit that they are letters to Caroline. Caroline, I hope you see them one day soon.

  Journey largely uneventful since Gillvany’s tragic death, though that event hangs over us like a cloud. Finch in particular has grown sullen uncommunicative. I think he blames himself. He writes relentlessly in his notebook, says little.

  We made our camp in the meadows Erasmus described. Have seen herds of wild fur snakes in great profusion, moving over the land like cloud shadows on a sunny day. Ever-resourceful, Tom Compton has even stalked and killed one, so we dine on snake meat — greasy steaks that taste like wildfowl, but a refreshing change after tinned rations. Our boats are securely stowed well up a beach, under tarps and beneath an outcropping of mossy granite, effectively hidden from all but the most exhaustive search. Though who do we suppose will find them in this empty land?

  We await the arrival of Erasmus with our pack snakes and supplies. Tom Compton insists we could have had any number of animals free of charge — they are (often quite literally!) all around us — but Erasmus’s beasts are trained to pack and bridle and have already relieved us of the need to ferry all our kit by boat.

  This assumes Erasmus will show up as promised.

  We all know each other very well by now — all our quirks idiosyncrasies, which are legion — and I have even had several rewarding conversations with Tom Compton, who has shown me more respect since the near wreck of the Perspicacity. In his eyes I am still the pampered Easterner who makes a soft living with a photo-box (as he calls it), but I have shown enough initiative to impress him.

  Certainly he has had a hard enough life to justify his skepticism. Born in San Francisco an impoverished mixed-breed, by his own account the descendant of slaves, Indians, failed goldminers — he managed to teach himself to read and found employment in the Merchant Marine, eventually made his way to Jeffersonville, a rough town with uses for his rough talents and tolerance for his rough manners.

  I know you would find him crude, Caroline, but he is a fundamentally good man useful in a crisis. I’m glad of his company.

  We have waited a week already for Erasmus and will wait at least another. Fortunately I have the copy of Argosy for which I traded Finch’s geology tome. The magazine contains an installment of E. R. Burroughs’ Lost Kingdom of Darwinia, more of his imagined “ancient hinterland” complete with dinosaurs, noble savages, and a colony of evil-minded Junkers to rule them. A princess requires rescue. I know your disdain for this type of fiction, Caroline, and I have to admit that even Burroughs’ wild Darwinia pales against close contact with the real thing: these too-solid hills and shadowy, cool forests. But the magazine is a delightful distraction I am much envied by the other Expeditionaries, since I have been chary about loaning the volume.

  I find myself looking forward to civilization — the tall buildings, the newsstands, and such.

  Erasmus arrived with the pack animals and accepted payment in the form of a check drawn on a Jeffersonville bank. He spent an evening in camp and expressed his condolences, though not his surprise, regarding Gillvany’s death.

 
; But his arrival was overshadowed by Avery Keck’s discovery. Keck and Tom Compton had gone on another snake hunt, Keck observing both the local geography and the frontiersman’s tracking skills. Not that the snakes required much tracking, as Keck explained over the campfire. They had simply cut off one snake from the herd and taken it down with a single shot from Tom Compton’s rifle. Dragging the carcass back to camp was the difficult part.

  More interesting, Keck said, was that they had come across an insect nest and its midden.

  The insects, Keck said, were ten-legged invertebrate carnivores, distantly related to the stump runners Guilford had encountered outside London. They tunneled in boggy lowland areas where the soil was loose and wet. A fur snake or any other animal wandering into the insects’ territory would be repeatedly bitten by the colony’s venomous drones, then swarmed and stripped of its meat. Cleaned bones were meticulously shuttled to the colony’s rim — the famous midden.

  “The older a colony, the bigger its midden,” Keck said. “I saw one nest in the Rhinish lowlands that had grown like a fairy ring, about a hundred meters across. The one Tom and I found is about average, in my experience. A perfect circle of pitted white bones. Mainly the bones of unlucky fur snakes, but—” Keck unwrapped the oilcloth package he had carried back to camp. “We found this.”

  It was a long, high-domed, spike-toothed skull. It was white as polished ivory, but it glittered redly in the firelight.