Galapagos Regained

by James Morrow

  Invited by Mr. Chadwick to talk about the tortoises, Chloe argued that they were descended from a small, vanished, domeshelled species that had long ago arrived from the mainland on seaweed rafts. Thus far, the crude carapace of the James Isle specimen had not hindered her, food being plentiful on her native formation. Here on Charles, however, her igloo-shaped shell would prove maladaptive.

  “Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the island on which we stand was lush,” she elaborated. “But then, like all environments, it began to change, nutritious vegetation becoming increasingly rare. Even as many of the domeshelled tortoises on Charles starved and went extinct, the descendants of the surviving descendants of their surviving descendants evolved the type of flared carapace you see before you.”

  Extending her right hand, Chloe snapped her fingers and pointed to the saddleback exhibit. Léourier removed the potted cactus from atop the tortoise and set it on the floor. As if responding to a theatre director’s cue, the animal stretched out his serpentine neck and began feasting on the higher pads. Sodden clots of green mash dribbled from his jaws.

  “Thanks to the arch in his shell, our saddleback friend can elevate his head and reach the upper fruits,” said Chloe.

  “And what of the third type of tortoise?” asked Mr. Chadwick.

  “If his homeland loses its flora,” said Chloe, “this Indefatigable slopeback and his immediate kin will probably disappear, though perhaps his descendants’ descendants’ descendants will transmute into saddlebacks.” Again she whistled. “Birds!”

  Leaving the tortoises in place, the Indians exited the courtroom, as did Rebecca and the other cleavewives. Eggwort’s entire harem appeared in a trice with a dozen bamboo birdcages, stacking them before the jury box in a chirping, tweeting, trilling pyramid. Chloe proceeded to discourse on the feathered exhibits, making the same points she’d overheard during the momentous Down House luncheon. How the four distinct species found within the mockingbird group bespoke a common ancestor, a principle that also applied to the three species of flycatcher and the half-dozen species of finch. How individual birds accidentally gifted with advantageous tails and wings enjoyed procreative success, likewise those favored with felicitous bills (certain forms being well suited to penetrating cactus fruit, others to cracking seeds, still others to tweezing insects), whilst the poorly endowed went extinct. How the progenitor of all the world’s birds had not arrived full-blown upon the face of the Earth but had itself descended from a beaked, egg-laying, featherless, wingless creature of reptilian pedigree.

  “The jury is eager to learn whether the theory of natural selection applies to our own species,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  “No, we’re not,” said Nathan the pickpocket.

  “Mr. Caedmon is hardly the first scientist to remark on a physical resemblance between apes and humans,” said Chloe. “Squint, and a marmoset looks remarkably like a marquis. According to evolutionary theory, if we follow certain particular limbs on the Tree of Life back far enough in time we’ll encounter an extinct, hairy, four-legged, forest-dwelling, tail-sporting beast whose offspring’s offspring’s offspring will one day find themselves walking the Earth not only as apes and monkeys but also as the animal called Homo sapiens.” Once more she whistled. “Bones!”

  Pregnant Naomi marched into the tabernacle bearing Chloe’s requested skull and the collateral spinal-column segment. Like a relic monger exhibiting bits of saints to prospective customers, Naomi paraded the bones before the jurymen, then deposited them on the defense table.

  “Mr. Caedmon contends that our skeletons reveal signs of an extinct ancestor held in common by today’s apes and men.” Brandishing the spinal-column segment like Pirate Anne wielding a cutlass, Chloe indicated the nethermost vertebra: a narrow, tapered, dagger-like vestige. “Behold the human coccyx, a small but graphic reminder of our descent from creatures that had tails.”

  “I never had a tail,” protested Clarence the usurer.

  “My uncle did,” said George the train robber.

  “Now consider those implements with which we chew our food.” Chloe slipped her index finger beneath her upper lip, sliding it back and forth. “Run a finger along your top gum, and you’ll encounter two enormous canine roots. Go ahead, gentlemen. Try it yourselves.”

  The jurors probed their gums, as did everyone else in the tabernacle.

  “Why are these teeth so elaborately anchored?” With the aid of the bayonet Chloe prised both upper canines free of the skull, fat roots included. She passed them to Léourier, who straightaway presented the evidence to the jury. “As you can see, the usable parts of a modern man’s cuspids are not a whit more impressive than his incisors or molars. Ah, but the canine teeth of our simian ancestors were in fact weapons, long and sharp like those of a baboon.”

  As the aeronaut returned the teeth to Chloe, she found herself recalling The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In both the play and Mr. Poe’s original tale, the killer had proved to be an escaped orang-utang. The ape did it. Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn had the same plot, she realized. On this sweltering tropical morn, here in the White Horse Prophecy Tabernacle, a deicide had occurred, for when a simian shambles free of the jungle and enters the savannah, where her posterity will over the course of innumerable generations discover fire, make tools, plant gardens, build bridges, write poetry, and name the stars, then God has in effect been murdered. The ape did it.

  “Miss Bathurst, will you please summarize your case against the Almighty’s alleged factuality?” asked Mr. Chadwick.

  Rising in as regal a fashion as she could contrive, Chloe glided away from the witness chair and approached the jury box, locking eyes with each of the twelve in turn. “If our essential written testament to God’s modus operandi is naught but a myth, then that is a reason to doubt His reality. If there was no first man called Adam, merely tribes of apes being buffeted about by time and chance, then no divine Galilean rabbi was needed to redeem that nonexistent first man’s fall, the lapse having never occurred. If the pageant of life on this planet, from worms to wolves to we ourselves, has drawn its energy solely from the Earth, then Heaven and its denizens may very well be fictitious.”

  She returned to the witness chair at a stately pace, pausing in a shaft of sunlight (so that she briefly became an English mystic again), then stepping abruptly away as the curtain descended on The Ashes of Eden.

  “No further questions,” said Mr. Chadwick.

  “Miss Bathurst, you have exceeded my expectations,” said Eggwort. “Mr. Tappert, when you cross-examine the witness, please try to elicit more such outlandish bellywash.”

  “I’ll do my best, Your Honor,” said the chief prosecutor.

  Taking up his mallet, Eggwort struck the bench and declared a midday recess. Straightaway his harem appeared with wooden bowls and steaming copper tureens filled with the day’s chowder. The noises that subsequently resounded through the tabernacle recalled for Chloe her first day on Galápagos: the Charles Isle saddlebacks slurping mossy water from their pool.

  As Chloe and Mr. Chadwick returned to the defense table, the vicar told her, “You were brilliant.”

  “Magnifique!” Léourier declared.

  “My fair philosopher,” said Ralph, “you were born to play the part of Derrick Caedmon’s zookeeper.”

  “The part of his fellow transmutationist,” Chloe corrected him.

  “Mr. Caedmon sounds like a remarkable man.”

  “The most remarkable I’ve ever known,” said Chloe.

  “I’m grateful to have my she-devil back, but they’re going to hang me anyway,” said Solange.

  “I won’t let them do that,” said Chloe.

  “We need more marmosets in this courtroom,” said Ralph, “and fewer kangaroos.”

  * * *

  Despite the turbulence in her guts, Chloe forced herself to consume her entire portion of chowder, lest she grow weak during her battle with the chief prosecutor. It was thus with a full stomach, though not a settl
ed mind, that she returned to the witness chair, sandalwood box in hand, and made ready to endure Jethro Tappert’s assault. He approached her with the confident swagger of a royal headsman applying for the job of village butcher.

  At first the chief prosecutor offered only the most conventional objections to Derrick Caedmon’s theory. The Earth was too young, the fossil record too spotty, for a rational man to favor a secular Tree of Life over a divinely seeded Garden of Eden. Although advantageous novelties might appear from time to time, each such trait would be diluted long before it could guarantee its beneficiaries’ evolutionary success.

  Flourishing the transmutation sketch, Chloe articulated the ripostes that lay therein. No, the Earth was not too young. Read Charles Lyell or any other competent geologist. Of course the fossil record was spotty. The search for such evidence had barely begun. As for the alleged dilution problem, the persistence of hemophilia from generation to generation ruled out blending as the primary mechanism of heredity.

  “Even if we allow that natural solicitation has occurred on our planet,” said Tappert, “what’s to prevent a pious scientist from sayin’ it’s nothin’ but the method God uses to make new species and fit ’em into convivial habitations? All your Mr. Caedmon did, it seems to me, was put some names to them ‘fixed laws’ our Creator laid down at the beginnin’ of time, which means there ain’t no need to choose between believin’ in God and trustin’ in transmutation.”

  So now it was upon her, that dreaded paragon of oxymorons: evangelical Deism. Hear me, O Epicurus. Help me, mighty Lucretius. Come forth like Lazarus and save my friends from the noose.

  “Judge Eggwort, Mr. Tappert, good jurymen, I invite you to picture a world in which the gods are regarded as irrelevant to human affairs,” said Chloe. “Instead of inventing Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hindooism, Buddhism, and the rest, people have elected to account for reality in largely materialist terms. Such a philosophy, in fact, once flourished. I refer to the ideas of the ancient sage Epicurus, as immortalized in the first century B.C. by the poet Lucretius in De Rerum Natura. Along with an earlier sage called Democritus, Epicurus taught that ultimately nothing exists save for atoms and void.” She removed her Panama hat and fanned herself with the brim. “Can we be confident that a world keyed to Greek atomism would adopt a non-supernatural theory of evolution? I think so. And would this world eventually come to include steam trains, clipper ships, spinning jennies, landscape paintings, love ballads, piano concertos, theatrical melodramas, vintage wines, and other such secular amenities? I don’t doubt it.”

  “It’s a far better place than Mephistropolis,” noted Harry the panderer.

  “Now imagine that, after our hypothetical atomist civilization has been thriving for several thousand years, a bearded patriarch comes traipsing out of the desert. ‘Harken!’ he cries. ‘An invisible but very talkative and person-like entity has manifested Himself to me! Harken! This entity is the very Architect of the Cosmos, dwelling everywhere and causing everything! You must outgrow your childish affection for the given world and fall down in awe before the One True God!’”

  Slipping free of the witness chair, Chloe marched towards the jury box, where she favored each inmate with the same beguiling smile she’d cultivated whilst playing Queen Cleopatra.

  “Very well, I suppose it’s conceivable that our atomists would leap for joy, turn to the patriarch, and say, ‘My goodness, sir, you certainly got that right—your One True God theory harmonizes perfectly with our materialist understanding of the world. Your revelation accords completely with our reason. Thank you for bringing us this marvelous gift.’”

  “Miss Bathurst, sit down!” cried Eggwort. “You’re attemptin’ to mesmerize the jury!”

  “Conceivable, good sirs, but implausible! So implausible in fact that I shall abstain from elaboration, lest I insult the shade of Epicurus by taking his foes seriously!”

  As Chloe strode back to the witness chair, an exasperated Tappert flicked his wrists as if to shake water from his fingertips. “I’m no longer angry with you, Miss Bathurst. Your derangement evokes only my pity—everythin’ else has dropped away. I got no further questions.”

  Surveying the saddleback tortoise, who seemed to meet her gaze with sympathetic eyes, Chloe reassumed her place at the defense table.

  “Epicurus served us even better than I’d hoped,” declared Mr. Chadwick.

  “On returning to France, I shall read my Lucretius again,” said Léourier.

  “On arriving in Hell, I shall tell both sages they almost saved my life,” said Solange.

  “The jury will retire to their prison cells and begin deliberatin’,” Eggwort announced.

  “Your Honor,” said Ben the horse thief, rising from his egg crate, “I would ask a boon of the expert witness.” Doffing his burlap skullcap, he turned to Chloe. “Miss Bathurst, might I borrow that treatise of Mr. Caedmon’s? His ideas are probably too dense for us, but we ought to give it a try.”

  Although she had never imagined that Mephistropolis might be amongst the way stations where “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification” stopped during its South American odyssey, she did not doubt the juror’s sincerity. She handed the sandalwood box to Léourier, who in turn delivered it to the horse thief.

  “Tomorrow at nine o’clock we’ll convene to hear the verdict, after which I shall pass sentence on the defendants,” said Eggwort.

  “Unless we’re found innocent,” noted Ralph.

  “Perfessor, you seem to ferget where your sinful flesh and sorry bones reside at present,” said Judge Eggwort. “In Duntopia, we navigate by the Tablets of the Law, not the lodestone of your predilections.” He hammered the bench with the enthusiasm of a latter-day Samson crushing the skulls of the Philistine army. “This court is adjourned!”

  * * *

  There was nothing like a blast of Peruvian snuff for scraping detritus from the walls of a person’s skull, all that encrusted dread, those barnacles of remorse, and so Chloe imagined that the epená would shield her from the imminent verdict in Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn. Sprawled across the gondola floor, she groped about in the murk of dawn, eventually finding the rubber syringe. She filled it with resin, slipped the nipple into her nostril, and squeezed the bulb. Her brain soon found itself in El Dorado, afloat in the city’s most peaceful fountain, the limpid blue waters washing over her cerebral convolutions even as the rest of her remained in Galápagos.

  Cradling the syringe and a phial of snuff, she followed Mr. Chadwick and Capitaine Léourier as they exited the airship, crossed the glittering beach, and hiked over the cinder cones towards Minor Zion. Starting along the frozen-lava path that led to the courthouse, Chloe and her companions encountered Rebecca Eggwort, who reported that the Huancabamba tortoise team had just embarked for Hood’s Isle in an outrigger canoe.

  “I figured we was done showin’ the jury the domeshelled female, so I told the Indians they could leave,” said Rebecca. “But if worse comes to worst, the half-dozen of us not with child at the moment—well, Constance ain’t so sure of her situation—we six could probably parade her up and down in front of the jury box.”

  “Our domeshell illustration has played her part, likewise the other creatures in the bestiary,” said Chloe. “After we hear the verdict, you might as well set all our local exhibits free—the saddleback male, the red iguanas, the Charles Isle finches.”

  “I shall never look at a finch’s beak in quite the same way again,” said Rebecca.

  “May I tell you something, Mrs. Eggwort?” said Chloe. “I spoke that very same sentence two years ago in Mr. Caedmon’s zoo, right after I’d first heard him explain his species theory.”

  “I’ll bet you understood it right away, Miss Bathurst, you bein’ such a bright lady,” said Rebecca.

  “Truth to tell, Mrs. Eggwort, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

  The defense team proceeded to the tabernacle, pausing before the illustrative specimens: birds flut
tering in their cages, tethered aquatic lizards breaking their fast with algae, penned terrestrial lizards munching cactus-plant fruits, tortoises gawking at passing Latter-Day Saints—a tableau suggesting Noah’s menagerie queuing up to board the ark. Owing to the epená, Chloe entered into conversation with the saddleback male.

  “Were you satisfied with my performance?” asked the tortoise. “Did I demonstrate the evolutionary advantages of an unencumbered neck?”

  “Should the jury find against my friends, you’ll share not a particle of blame,” she replied.

  “What are we doing here, Miss Bathurst? In the universe, I mean.”

  The epená summoned a meandering smile to her lips. “You’re asking the wrong woman. I’m merely a transmutationist. The universe is not my line of country.”

  The tabernacle was already packed, spectators thronging the pews, jurors poised on their cheese casks, Judge Eggwort tenderizing his palm with the roofing mallet, Tappert and Hatch perusing the Book of Mormon. Speaking not a word, Chloe assumed her seat and passed the resin syringe to Solange, who availed herself of its magic.

  “I know what I’m requesting for my last meal,” said Solange, handing the latex bulb to her co-defendant. “A bottle of pisco and a pound of Peruvian snuff.”

  “Two bottles for me,” said Ralph, “and enough epená to fly me to the brothels of Baghdad.”

  Judge Eggwort called the proceeding to order. Silence descended, a quietude so intense as to make the rude building seem like what it really was, a house of prayer.

  “The jury foreman will deliver the verdict,” said the chief magistrate.

  Joe the poacher stood fully erect. “‘May it please the Court,’” he read in a halting voice, eyes fixed on a scrap of paper fluttering in his hand. “‘As it ’appens, we all ’ad different reactions to the testimonies, the upshot being that each man will speak ’is mind in turn.’”

  “Six votes for acquittal, and you walk free,” Mr. Chadwick reminded his clients.