Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  Participants would meet twice, two years apart. The first week-long meeting would be to review current issues and refine subjects for subsequent monographs by individual members. Two years later, they would formally present their papers, with discussion following. The papers, along with the discussions, would then be published as the Transactions of the Consortium of the Scillies. A new group of Fellows would be chosen for the following two-year cycle, and so on.

  The sessions would be at Kozlov’s castle on St. Mary’s, where participants would also live and dine. All expenses would be covered, and there would be a $50,000 stipend out of Kozlov’s own pocket, to be presented when their papers were delivered and accepted at the second meeting. With stipulations like these, there was no shortage of applicants. Right from the start, the biannual Transactions, with their offbeat, unorthodox views and conclusions, had created a stir in the media that gladdened Kozlov’s heart, despite their being received with amused derision in mainstream conservation circles.

  Having begun in 1995, the consortium was now in its fourth incarnation, and had changed little, except that Kozlov, responding reluctantly to mainstream criticism, now included one or two token “establishment” participants in the mix. The current consortium had two such members. One was Liz Petra, an archaeologist with the State of New York, who had years ago taken a couple of courses with Gideon and whose specialty was “garbology,” the study of populations through analysis of their waste products and refuse. The other, amazingly enough, was Julie. She had sent in her application mostly as a lark—it was understood that her $50,000 stipend would go to the National Park Service in any case—but the paper she proposed to research and write, an assessment of changing wildfire management policies, had caught Kozlov’s interest. And so here she was, with Gideon along for the ride.

  The first of the two meetings, two years earlier, had come during finals week at the University of Washington, making it impossible for him to come with her. This time the quarter was over, and so here he was too, proud of his wife and quite content to be playing the unaccustomed role of accompanying spouse.

  THE Penzance Promenade is actually the top of the nineteenth-century, block-cut-stone seawall, with a wide shingle beach on one side and the old town sloping up away from it on the other. They had walked its length, from Battery Rocks, past the Victorian-era Jubilee Swimming Pool and the public gardens, and down the long row of seaside hotels, guest houses, and restaurants, to the curve in Mount’s Bay, where town, seawall, and promenade all peter out. It’s a nice walk at sunset, when the massive granite blocks underfoot look golden and the air itself has a burnished, Victorian feel to it, and it tends to make walkers reflective.

  “It’s not that Edgar didn’t have something valuable to add,” Julie mused as they sat on the last of the benches, finishing their ice cream cones, “but, well, he was one of those people who just sucked the oxygen out of the room. I remember, at dinner sometimes, when he’d leave early, it was as if this glowering black cloud had lifted.”

  “I know. I’ve seen him on TV panels once or twice,” Gideon said. “Kind of a bully, I thought.”

  “I’d say most people who had anything to do with him would agree with that.”

  “Also very taken with himself—the handsome, brooding defender of the wilds.”

  “That, too. Definitely.”

  “Come on, let’s head back,” Gideon said.

  Strolling eastward on the promenade brings with it the famous view of St. Michael’s Mount, the great, castle-topped medieval stone pile sitting in isolated glory far out in Mount’s Bay, and for a few minutes they walked toward it in silence, watching it turn from amber, to pale straw, to flaming orange as dusk settled in.

  “Gideon,” Julie said after a while, “are you going to sit in on any of the sessions? Vasily would love for you to participate. He told me so in the last e-mail. He really respects you.”

  “If I sit in, would he stop charging me twenty bucks a day?”

  They both laughed, but it was a fact. Kozlov, generous as he might be in some respects, was a penny-pincher in others. Fellows were welcome to bring partners to the meetings, but additional food and lodging charges of twenty dollars a day (“to pay for extra work-staff peoples”) would be applied.

  “He just might,” Julie said.

  “Even so, I think I’ll pass. I have some work with me, and I also want to get over to the outer islands to see the Bronze and Iron Age sites, and then—”

  “No, really, why won’t you?”

  Gideon hesitated and shrugged. “I just don’t think I’d be comfortable getting involved. It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.” He was treading carefully. Julie was naturally delighted to be a Fellow, and Gideon was delighted for her; the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to rain on her parade.

  “I don’t understand why not. ”Issues in Biodiversity and Conservation Biology.“ I’d think it would be just your cup of tea.”

  “Well, the thing is… you know, I looked at the participants’ bios, and frankly, I wasn’t exactly bowled over by them.”

  “These are pretty capable people, Gideon. Vasily’s a little eccentric, yes, but he’s a certified genius, and he didn’t pick a bunch of wackos.”

  “I know that. But except for Liz, there’s not a single Ph.D. in the crowd, and her degree’s in archaeology, with a specialty in garbage.”

  “What about Rudy Walker, your old buddy from the University of Wisconsin? You said he was smart.”

  Rudy Walker was the one other member of the consortium that Gideon knew personally, although it had been many years since they’d been in touch. The two of them had been research assistants at Wisconsin when they were working on their doctorates. Rudy was seven or eight years the elder—he had gotten a medical discharge from the Army after shattering both wrists during the invasion of Grenada, and he’d had a wife and a five-year-old daughter. He had taken the younger, greener Gideon under his wing. They had worked together, with Rudy as the senior assistant, on an important but grisly project for their major professor: injecting dyes into the soft, developing bones of aborted fetuses of varying known ages to determine the exact progression of skeletal formation. Despite the morbid hours in the lab (windowless and underground, to avoid offending the sensitive or the delicate-stomached), Gideon remembered his years at Wisconsin as a happy time of much laughter and much learning. This was thanks largely to Rudy. There had been so many late-night pizzas at the Student Union, so many pitchers of beer, so many abstruse, hilarious, academic arguments with Rudy and his equally vibrant young wife Fran, another anthropology grad student. A great time, looked back upon with pleasure.

  And yes, Rudy was smart, all right.

  “He got his Master’s—with honors—but never did get his doctorate,” Gideon maintained. “I went on to Arizona for mine, and Rudy went to Penn State, but he quit before he finished—never took his comps, never did a dissertation—to take a job with some private college up in Toronto, and there he stayed. Apparently never finished up. No Ph.D. on his bio.”

  “Oho, now we’re getting down to brass tacks. Only Ph.D.”s meet your high standards of discourse, is that it?“

  “If the subject is as complex as biodiversity and the people talking about it expect to be taken seriously—yes.”

  “Gideon, has anyone ever told you you’re an intellectual snob?”

  He laughed. “Not since last Friday. Look, let me put it this way. As smart as some of these people might be—and I grant you, Kozlov himself is a bona fide genius—they don’t have the advantage of a thorough, rigorous, scientific education. Okay, they know a lot, but, like anybody who’s ‘self-made,” they’re also bound to have gaps— misapprehensions, misconceptions—that they don’t even know they have because they’ve never been tested, they’ve never been required to learn material they don’t feel like learning, and they’ve never had to put together a dissertation to the satisfaction of a highly critical committee.“

 
“So?”

  “So you know me; if I’m sitting there and I hear some typical misunderstandings, say about the mechanics of evolution or natural selection, getting thrown around as if they were good science, I’m not sure I could control myself.”

  “You might go into lecture mode, you mean.”

  “Exactly, the dreaded lecture mode. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d bore the hell out of everybody. And this isn’t my show, Julie. Nobody’s there to hear me.”

  There was more to it than that, but he wasn’t about to give voice to it. Simply put, this was one of Julie’s rare chances to shine outside the world of the National Park Service. She had put a lot of time and a lot of work into her paper, and he wasn’t about to take even a remote chance of upstaging her.

  She gave it some thought. “You know, I’m beginning to see the wisdom of your position,” she said. “Good, I’m glad that’s settled.”

  For a few minutes they walked along amicably enough, hand in hand, and then Julie suddenly stopped and turned to face him.

  “Wait a minute, all I have is an M.A. Therefore I can’t be taken seriously?”

  “Well, in your case—”

  She held up a warning finger. “Consider your reply carefully.”

  “In your case,” he continued smoothly, “you’re not pretending to be an authority on biodiversity. You’re here as a wildfire management expert—which you certainly are.”

  “Uh-huh, and what about my paper? Is it full of ‘misapprehensions’ and ’misconceptions‘?”

  “I think,” he said, unblinking, “that your paper is absolutely brilliant.”

  Their eyes remained locked for a second more. “Good answer,” she said as they began walking again.

  “Whew,” he said softly.

  “FROM this vantage point,” intoned the sonorous voice from the loudspeakers, “we look back at the whole of Land’s End, the rugged promontory that marks the southeasternmost point of the mainland of England. And we are lulled by our first sense of the gentle Atlantic swell, which has traveled three thousand miles, only to impotently expend its energy against these stark and ancient cliffs.”

  “Gentle swells!” somebody called out. “Try lookin‘ out the bloody window, mate!”

  The ripple of laughter that greeted this was a trifle apprehensive, but after a few anxious minutes during which people’s eyes roamed in search of a quick exit to the open air of the deck, should one become necessary, the surge grew calm and the ferry settled into a slow heave that most of the passengers found more relaxing than discomforting. The minority who felt otherwise gratefully followed the posted directions to the windowless lowest deck, where ranks of permanently set-up cots were waiting.

  The soothing narrative continued: “And now, in the far distance we can see the Isles of Scilly themselves, the fabled Fortunate Islands, thought by many to be the mountain peaks of the sunken, lost land of Lyonesse. There are five inhabited islands, forty uninhabited ones, and a hundred-and-fifty—”

  “Am I wrong,” Gideon asked Julie, “or is that Liz Petra in the snack bar line?” He pointed at a small, plump figure in a shawl, a flowing peasant skirt, and sandals.

  Julie turned to look. “It sure is. Liz! Over here!”

  The pixie-faced blonde’s eyes lit up. “Julene! Hello! Be there in a sec.” She went back to paying for the bag of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers she was buying.

  Gideon looked at Julie, eyebrows raised. “ ‘Julene’!”

  Julie mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Oh, heck, it just seemed more professional,” she muttered.

  “Ah. Well, I suppose it is, at that.” He was happier than ever with his decision not to horn in on the meetings.

  “Well, hi there, Julene!” Liz chirped as Julie jumped up to embrace her. “My favorite fellow Fellow! And I see you’ve brought the famous, or should I say infamous, Skeleton Detective along with you.” She stuck out her hand. “Long time no see, prof.”

  It had been more than five years since she’d sat in on his nonhuman primate social behavior seminar as a graduate student in archaeology, but she seemed to have changed not a bit: still the same soft, dimply, unfailingly jolly dumpling of a person she was back then, grandmotherly (despite her pretty face) and chuckling, nurturing even at the age of thirty-five, and still apparently favoring the same vintage-clothing-store wardrobe, which had been passe even then. Only now she was a figure of note in the unlikely but burgeoning discipline of refuse archaeology.

  “It’s great to see you again, Liz,” he said, grasping her hand and moving over to make room for her in their booth. “What’s new in the world of garbage?”

  “Things have been pretty trashy, actually,” she said, plopping down. “So how’s the bone business?”

  “Oh, kind of dry, to tell the truth.”

  Julie rolled her eyes at this show of what passed for academic humor. “Liz, they found Edgar’s remains, did you hear? He was eaten by a bear!”

  Liz’s clear blue eyes sparkled even more. “Yes, Joey just told me. Is that creepy, or what?”

  “Joey Dillard? Is he on this ferry too?”

  “Well, he was a minute ago. Back there near the Coke machine.”

  Julie looked over Liz’s shoulder and waved. “Joey! Come join us!”

  Joey Dillard, if Gideon remembered correctly, had been an investigative reporter for a paper somewhere in the Midwest—Gary, or Des Moines. He had been assigned to do a series on a new meatpacking operation and had come away so revolted that he became a vegetarian on the spot. He then joined PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—and several lesser-known groups, had since become an officer in some of them, and was now a fairly well-known writer for various animal-rights, vegetarian, and ecology magazines and Web publications.

  Knowing his background, Gideon had anticipated an investigative reporter-type: assertive, belligerent, and pushy. Instead, a toothy, bespectacled, generally alarmed-looking young man with fine, pale, almost colorless hair trimmed in a crew-cut acknowledged Liz’s wave and made his way toward them. A faint tic jumped below his right eye. He earnestly clasped a couple of dog-eared magazines to his narrow chest and wore two large, worded buttons on his shirt.

  “Oh, Lord” Gideon muttered, “save me from people who walk around with buttons.”

  Julie smiled. “Oh, Joey’s not so bad—”

  “As long as you don’t take him too seriously,” Liz said kindly. “He means well.”

  “I know,” Julie said. “He’s sweet, really.”

  Dillard made his hellos, shook hands with Gideon (a cold, damp palm), and sat down next to Julie. The button below his left collar-point said People who abuse animals rarely stop there. The bigger one on his right, less ominous but more comprehensible, said Animals are not fabric. Wear your own damn skin.

  Dillard saw Gideon reading them and nervously drew himself up a little straighter, ready to do battle, the tic beneath his eye speeding up. But Gideon, determined not to make waves, simply said, “Glad to meet you, Joey. We were just talking about Edgar Villarreal.”

  Joey immediately lowered his guns, reset the safeties, and relaxed. “You mean the bear? God, that was just so terrible. I’m really going to miss his contributions this year.” As far as Gideon could tell, Joey meant it, but he noted that Liz and Julie declined to commiserate.

  Joey noticed too. “I mean, sure, he may have had a few problems personalitywise,” he mumbled, “but he really added something valuable, you have to give him that.” When no one seemed willing to give him that, Joey turned it up a notch. “Personally, I liked the guy.”

  Another long beat passed before Liz finally responded, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Well, it’s not as if he would have been here anyway. He did quit, you know.”

  “He did?” said Julie.

  “He did?” said Joey.

  “Didn’t you know? I heard it from Vasily months ago.”

  “But why?” Joey ask
ed.

  “Well”—she offered the bag of milk-chocolate-covered biscuits around. Joey was the only taker—“remember when he gave that talk in town and, what was his name, Pete Williams got all over his case?”

  “Who’s Pete Williams?” Gideon asked, but they were too absorbed to hear him.

  “How could I forget?” Joey asked. “It was awful. Edgar was really, really upset. We all went over to the Bishop and Wolf for a drink afterward, and he was muttering in his beer, remember?”

  Liz nodded and put on an overblown version of Villarreal’s mild Spanish accent. “ ‘I keel ’im, dat bastar‘, dat leedle peepsqueak.” Anyway, apparently it was enough to make him never want to come back. That and a few million other reasons, but that had to be the last straw. Anyway, when he got back to the States he faxed Vasily a letter resigning from the consortium. I don’t think Vasily was too upset to hear it. Frankly, I wasn’t too upset myself.“

  “I guess he didn’t need the fifty thousand,” Joey said. “I sure wish I could say that.” He removed a thin, tar-black cellophane-wrapped cigar from a shirt pocket and held it up. “Do you mind?”

  “Yes,” said Liz.

  “Yes,” said Julie.

  “Oh,” Joey said meekly and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

  “You can save it for the catwalk,” Liz said, and then explained to Gideon: “There’s a kind of catwalk around the roof of the castle. He prowls it after dark, like the Phantom of the Opera, smoking his foul weed.”

  “It’s the only place they let me,” Joey said with a sigh.

  “What do you mean, ”they‘? Those are Kozlov’s house rules. Don’t blame us. Not that I’m objecting to them.“

  “I didn’t go to that talk of Edgar’s,” Julie said. “It was the final night, and I suppose I’d had more than enough of Edgar Villarreal by then. I heard it didn’t go well, but what exactly happened?”

  Between them, Liz and Joey explained. Villarreal, as the best-known of the consortium fellows, had been approached by the local tourist office and asked to make a public presentation in Hugh Town, St. Mary’s main village. He had agreed, and on their final night on St. Mary’s, he had given a talk at Methodist Hall. Not many had come: two dozen curious locals; six or eight tourists who’d happened to be on St. Mary’s and were starved for something—anything—to do in the evening; all of the consortium attendees other than Julie; and three reporters, one from as far away as Plymouth—plus Pete Williams, who had been hanging around all week, having come all the way from London.