Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He hadn’t been an exceptional officer before 1912. Had he changed, or had the Army changed around him? He excelled as a sort of Officer Corps shop steward; lived monkishly, survived bitter winters and dry, enervating summers with a surprising degree of patience. The knowledge that he might as easily have been beheaded by Mahdists enforced a certain humility. Eventually he was ordered to Ottawa, where military engineers were in demand as the reconstruction gathered momentum.

  It was called “reconstruction” but it was also called Kitchener’s Folly: the founding of a new London on the banks of a river that was only approximately the Thames. Building Jerusalem in a green and unpleasant land. Only a gesture, critics said, but even the gesture would have been impossible if not for the crippled but still powerful Royal Navy. The United States had put forward its arrogant claim that Europe should be “free and open to resettlement and without borders” — the so-called Wilson Doctrine, which meant in practice an American hegemony, an American New World. The German and French rump regimes, gutted by conflicting claims of legitimacy and the loss of European resources, backed down after a few shots were exchanged. Kitchener had been able to negotiate an exception for the British Isles, which provoked more protest. But the displaced remnants of Old Europe, lacking any real industrial base, could hardly face down the combined power of the Royal Navy and the White Fleet.

  And so, a standoff. But not, Watson thought, a stable one. For instance: this civilian freighter and its military cargo. He had been assigned to oversee a clandestine shipment of arms from Halifax to London. He supposed the armory there was being stocked, but it hadn’t been the first such shipment under Kitchener’s private orders and likely wouldn’t be the last. Watson couldn’t guess why the New World needed so many rifles and Maxim guns and mortars… unless the peace wasn’t as peaceful as it seemed.

  The voyage had passed uneventfully. The seas were calm, the days so bright they might have been hammered in blue metal. Watson had used his ample free time to reconsider his life. Compared to some, he had emerged from the tragedy of 1912 relatively lightly. His parents were dead before the Conversion and he had no siblings, no wife or children to grieve for. Only a way of life. A baggage of fading memories. The past was cut loose and the years, absent compass or ballast, had passed terribly quickly. Perhaps it was fitting then that he had blown back to England at last: to this new England, this feverish pseudo-England. To this hot, prosaic Port Authority in a brick blockhouse gray with dust. He identified himself, was shown into a back room and introduced to a portly South African merchant who had volunteered his warehouse to shelter the munitions until the Armory was ready to receive them. Pierce, the man’s name was. Jered Pierce.

  Watson put out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Pierce.”

  The South African closed Watson’s hand in his own huge paw. “Likewise, sir, I’m sure.”

  Caroline was frightened of London but bored in the cramped warren of her uncle’s store. She had taken over her aunt Alice’s chores from time to time, and that was all right, but there was Lily to worry about. Caroline didn’t want her playing alone in the street, where the dust was thick and the gutters unspeakable, and indoors she was a constant terror, chasing the cat or holding tea parties with Alice’s china figurines. So when Alice offered to watch Lily while Caroline took Jered’s lunch to the docks, Caroline was grateful for the break. She felt suddenly unchained and deliciously alone.

  She had promised herself she wouldn’t think about Guilford this afternoon, and she tried to focus her attention elsewhere. A group of grubby English children — to think, the youngest of them might have been born in this nightmarish place! — ran past her. One boy dragged a bush jumper behind him on a string; the animal’s six pale green legs pumped frantically and its dark eyes rolled with fear. Maybe it was good, that fear. Good that in this half-human world the terror worked both ways. These were thoughts she could never have shared with Guilford.

  But Guilford was gone. Well, there, Caroline thought: admit it. Only disaster could bring him back before autumn, and probably not even that. She supposed he had already entered the back country of Darwinia, a place even stranger than this grim shadow of London.

  She had stopped asking herself why. He had explained patiently a dozen times, and his answers made a superficial kind of sense. But Caroline knew he had other motives, unspoken, powerful as tides. The wilderness had called out to Guilford and Guilford had run away to it, and never mind the savage animals, the wild rivers, the fevers and the bandits. Like an unhappy little boy, he had run away from home.

  And left her here. She hated this England, hated even to call it that. She hated its noises, both the clatter of human commerce and the sounds of nature (worse!) that leaked through the window at night, sounds whose sources were wholly mysterious to her, a chattering as of insects; a keening as of some small, injured dog. She hated the stench of it, and she hated its poisonous forests and haunted rivers. London was a prison guarded by monsters.

  She turned onto the river road. Trenches and sewers trickled their burden of waste into the Thames; raucous gulls raced over the water. Caroline gazed aloofly at the river traffic. Far off across the brown water a silt snake raised its head, its pebbled neck bent like a question mark. She watched the harbor cranes unload a sailing ship — the cost of coal had revived the Age of Sail, though these particular sails were furled into an intricacy of masts. Men hatless or turbaned wheeled crates on immense carts and dollies; sunlit wagons nursed at shadowed loading bays. She stepped into the shade of the Port Authority building, where the air was thick but faintly cooler.

  Jered met her and took the lunch box from her hand. He thanked her in his absent-minded way and said, “Tell Alice I’ll be home for supper. And to set another place.” A tall man in a neat but threadbare uniform stood behind him, his eyes frankly focused on her. Jered finally noticed the stare. “Lieutenant Watson? This is Caroline Law, my niece.”

  The gaunt-faced Lieutenant nodded at her. “Miss,” he said gravely.

  “Mrs.,” she corrected him.

  “Mrs. Law.”

  “Lieutenant Watson will be boarding in the back room of the store for a while.”

  Caroline thought. Oh, will he? She gave the Lieutenant a more careful look.

  “The city barracks is crowded,” Jered said. “We take in boarders occasionally. King and Country and all.”

  Not my king, Caroline thought. Not my country.

  Chapter Seven

  “You know,” Professor Randall said, “I think I preferred the old-fashioned God, the one who refrained from miracles.”

  “There are miracles in the Bible,” Vale reminded him. When the professor was drinking, which was most of the time, he inclined toward a morose theology. Today Randall sat in Vale’s study expounding his thoughts, buttons popping on his vest and his forehead dotted with perspiration.

  “The miracles ought to have stayed there.” Randall sipped an expensive bourbon. Vale had bought it with the professor in mind. “Let God smite the Sodomites. Smiting the Belgians seems somehow ludicrous.”

  “Be careful, Dr. Randall. He might smite you.”

  “Surely He would have exercised that privilege long ago if He were so inclined. Have I committed a blasphemy, Mr. Vale? Then let me blaspheme some more. I doubt the death of Europe was an act of divine intervention, no matter what the clergy would like us to think.”

  “That’s not a popular opinion.”

  Randall glanced at the drawn curtains, the sheltering rows of books. “Am I in public here?”

  “No.”

  “It looks to me like a natural disaster. The Miracle, I mean. Obviously a disaster of some unknown kind, but if a man had never seen or even heard of, say, a tornado, wouldn’t that look like a miracle too?”

  “Every natural disaster is called an act of God.”

  “When in fact the tornado is only weather, no more supernatural than the spring rain.”

  “No more and no less. But yo
u’re a skeptic.”

  “Everyone’s a skeptic. Did God lean down and put his thumbprint on the Earth, Dr. Vale? William Jennings Bryan cared deeply about the answer to that question, but I don’t.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not in that sense. Oh, a lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis. The real question is how much we’ll suffer in the meantime. I mean political intolerance, fiscal meanness, even war.”

  Vale opened his eyes slightly, the only visible sign of the excitement that leapt in him like a flame. The gods had pricked up their ears. “War?”

  Randall might know something about war. He was a curator at the Smithsonian, but he was also one of that institution’s fund-raisers. He had spoken to congressional committees and had friends on the Hill.

  Was that why Vale’s god had taken an interest in Randall? One of the ironies of serving a god was that one didn’t necessarily understand either means or ends. He knew only that something was at stake here, compared to which his own ambitions were trivial. The resolution of some eons-long plan required him to draw this portly cynic into his confidence, and so it would be. I will be rewarded, Vale thought. His god had promised him. Life eternal, perhaps. And a decent living in the meantime.

  “War,” Randall said, “or at least some martial exercise to keep the Britons in their place. The Finch expedition — you’ve heard of it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “If the Finch expedition comes under Partisan attack, Congress will raise hell and blame the English. Sabers will be rattled. Young men will die.” Randall leaned toward Vale, the wattled skin of his neck creased and fleshy. “There’s no truth in it, is there? That you can talk to the dead?”

  It was like a door opening. Vale only smiled. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? I think I’m looking at a confidence man who smells like soap and knows how to charm a widow. No offense.”

  “Then why do you ask?”

  “Because… because things are different now. I think you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “I don’t believe in miracles, but…”

  “But?”

  “So much has changed. Politics, money, fashion — the map, obviously — but more than that. I see people, certain people, and there’s something in their eyes, their faces. Something new. As if they have a secret they’re keeping even from themselves. And that bothers me. I don’t understand it. So you see, Mr. Vale, I begin as a skeptic and end as a mystic. Blame it on the bourbon. But let me ask you again. Do you speak to the dead?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “And what do the dead tell you, Mr. Vale? What do the dead talk about?”

  “Life. The fate of the world.”

  “Any particulars?”

  “Often.”

  “Well, that’s cryptic. My wife is dead, you know. Last year. Of pneumonia.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I talk to her?” He put his glass on the desk. “Is that actually possible, Mr. Vale?”

  “Perhaps,” Vale said. “We’ll see.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Navy had a shallow-draft steamer at Jeffersonville to carry the Finch expedition to the navigable limits of the Rhine, but their departure was delayed when the pilot and much of the crew came down with Continental Fever. Guilford knew very little about the disease. “A bog fever,” Sullivan explained. “Exhausting but seldom fatal. We won’t be delayed long.”

  And a few sultry days later the vessel was ready to sail. Guilford set up his cameras on the floating wooden pier, his bulky dry-plate camera as well as the roll-film box. Photography had not advanced much since the Miracle; the long labor struggles of 1915 had shut down Eastman Kodak for most that year, and the Hawk-Eye Works in Rochester had burned to the ground. But, as such things went, both cameras were modern and elegantly machined. Guilford had tinted several of his own plates from the Montana expedition and intended to do the same with his Darwinian work, and with that in mind he kept careful notes:

  Fourteen members of expedition, pier at Jeffersonville, Europe: 1-r standing Preston Finch, Charles Curtis Hemphill, Avery Keck, Tom Gillvany, Kenneth Donner, Paul Robertson, Emil Swensen; 1-r kneeling Tom Compton, Christopher Tuckman, Ed Betts, Wilson W. Farr, Marion (“Diggs”) Digby, Raymond Burke, John W Sullivan.

  B/ground: Naval vessel Weston, hull gunmetal gray; J/ville harbor turquoise water under deep blue sky; Rhine marshes in a light northerly wind, gold green cloudshadow, 8 a.m. We depart.

  And so the journey began (it always seemed to be beginning, Guilford thought; beginning and beginning again) under a raw blue sky, spider rushes tossing like wheat in the wetlands. Guilford organized his gear in the tiny windowless space allotted to him and went up top to see whether the view had changed. By nightfall the marshy land gave way to a drier, sandier riverbank, the saltwater grasses to dense pagoda bushes and pipe-organ stalks on which the wind played tuneless calliope notes. After a gaudy sunset the land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.

  He slept fitfully in his hammock and woke up feverish. When he stood he was unsteady on his feet — the deck plates danced a waltz — and the smell of the galley made him turn away from breakfast. By noon he was ill enough to summon the expedition’s doctor, Wilson Farr, who diagnosed the Continental Fever.

  “Will I die?” Guilford asked.

  “You might knock on that door,” Farr said, squinting through eyeglass lenses not much larger than cigar bands, “but I doubt you’ll be admitted.”

  Sullivan came to see him during the evening, as the fever continued to rise and a rosy erythema covered Guilford’s arms and legs. He found it difficult to bring Sullivan into focus and their talk drifted like a rudderless ship, the older man attempting to distract him with theories about Darwinian life, the physical structure of its common invertebrates. Finally Sullivan said, “I’m sure you’re tired—” He was: unspeakably tired. “But I’ll leave you with a last thought, Mr. Law. How is it, d’you suppose, that a purely Darwinian disease, a miraculous microbe, can live and multiply in the body of ordinary mortals like ourselves? Doesn’t that seem more than coincidental?”

  “Can’t say,” Guilford muttered, and turned his face to the wall.

  At the height of his illness he dreamed he was a soldier pacing the margin of some airless, dusty battlefield: a picket among the dead, waiting for an unseen enemy, occasionally kneeling to drink from pools of tepid water in which his own reflection gazed back at him, his mirror-self unspeakably ancient and full of weary secrets.

  The dream submerged into a long void punctuated by lightning-flashes of nausea, but by Monday he was on the mend, his fever broken, well enough to take solid food and chafe at his confinement belowdecks as the Weston moved deeper inland. Farr brought him a current edition of Finch’s Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy, and Guilford was able to lose himself for a time in the several ages of the Earth, the Great Flood that had left its mark in cataclysmic reformations of the mantle, for example the Grand Canyon — unless, as Finch allowed, these features were “prior creations, endowed by their Author with the appearance of great age.”

  Creation modified by a worldwide flood, which had deposited fossil animals at various altitudes or buried them in mud and silt, as Eden itself must have been buried. Guilford had studied much of it before, though Finch buttressed his argument with a wealth of detail: the one hundred classifications of drift and diluvium; geological wheels in which extinct beasts were depicted in neat, separate categories. But that single phrase (“the appearance of age”) troubled him. It made all knowledge provisional. The world was a stage set — it might have been built yesterday, freshly equipped with mountains and mastodon bones and human memories �
� which gave the Creator an unseemly interest in deceiving his human creations and made no useful distinction between the work of time and the work of a miracle. It seemed to Guilford unnecessarily complex — though why, come to think of it, should the world be simple? More shocking, perhaps, if one could render the universe and all its stars and planets in a single equation (as the European mathematician Einstein was said to have tried to do).

  Finch would say that was why God had given humanity the Scriptures, to make sense of a bewildering world. And Guilford had to admire the weight and poetry, the convolute logic of Finch’s work. He wasn’t geologist enough to argue with it… though he did come away with the impression of a lofty cathedral erected on a few creaking two-by-fours.

  And Sullivan’s question nagged. How had Guilford caught a Darwinian bug, if the new continent was truly a separate creation? For that matter, how was it that men could digest certain Darwinian plants and animals? Some were poisonous — far too many — but some were nourishing, even delectable. Didn’t that imply a hidden similarity, a common, if distant, origin?

  Well, a common Creator, at least. Common ancestry, Sullivan had implied. But what was impossible on the face of it. Darwinia had existed for hardly more than a decade… or might have existed much longer, but not in any form sensible to the Earth.

  That was the paradox of the New Europe. Look for miracles, find history; look for history, run headlong into the blunt edge of a miracle.

  Rain chased the expedition for a day and a half, the lowlands glittering under a fine silver mist. The Rhine undulated through wild forests, Darwinian forests of a particularly deep and mossy green, finally passed into a gentle plain carpeted with a broad-leafed plant Tom Compton called fingerwort. The fingerwort had begun to bloom, tiny golden blossoms giving the meadows the glow of a premature autumn. It was an inviting view, by Darwinian standards, but if you walked in the fingerwort, the frontiersman said, you wore boots to your knees or risked a case of hives caused by the plants’ astringent yellow sap. Hovering insects called nettleflies swarmed the fields by day, but despite their thorny appearance they didn’t bite human flesh and would even perch on a fingertip, their translucent bodies finely filigreed, like miniature Christmas ornaments.