Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Well, shit!” Diggs exclaimed, which earned him a stiff look from Preston Finch.

  Guilford turned to Sullivan, who nodded. “Similar to the skull we saw in London.” He explained the Museum of Monstrosities. “Interesting. It looks to me like a large predator, and it must have been widely distributed, at least at one time.”

  “At one time?” Finch asked scornfully. “Do you mean 1913? Or 1915?”

  Sullivan ignored him. “How old would you judge this specimen to be, Mr. Keck?”

  “Couldn’t venture a guess. Obviously it’s neither fossilized nor weathered, so — relatively recent.”

  “Which means we might run into one of these beasties on the hoof,” Ed Betts put in. “Keep your pistols loaded.”

  Tom Compton had never seen a living sample of the creature, however, in all his wilderness experience, nor had the snake trader Erasmus — “Though people do disappear in the bush.”

  “Resembles a bear,” Diggs said. “California grizzly, if that’s an adult specimen. Might be drawn to garbage and such. How about we police the camp a little more scientifically from now on?”

  “Maybe they avoid people,” Sullivan said. “Maybe we frighten them.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “But that jaw could swallow a man’s leg up to the knee and probably snap it at the joint. If we frighten them, it ought to be mutual.”

  “We’ll double the night watch,” Finch decided.

  Even Eden had its serpent, Guilford thought.

  Come morning they set out across the gently rolling meadowland, southward toward the mountains. The fur snakes made passable riding animals — they didn’t mind bearing human cargo and would even respond to direction from a crude bridle — but their bodies were simply too wide to straddle comfortably (not to mention greasy and evil-smelling), and no one had yet invented a functional snake saddle. Guilford preferred to walk, even after the second day, when the march seemed infinitely more grueling, when calves and ankles and thighs made their most concerted protests.

  The meadowed hills rolled steadily higher. Fresh water was harder to find now, though the snakes could sense a creek or pool from a mile’s distance. And the mountains on the horizon, subject of Keck’s relentless triangulation, were clearly a barrier: the end of the road, even if Finch and company found an accessible pass where Brenner or Mount Genevre had been. Then we turn around, Guilford thought, and take our pressed plants and punctured bugs back to America, and people will say we helped “tame” the continent, though that’s a joke: we’re a very small pinprick of knowledge on the skin of this unknown country.

  But he was proud of what they had accomplished. We walked, he told the frontiersman, where no one else had walked, puzzled out at least a few of Darwinia’s secrets.

  “We haven’t fucked the continent,” Tom Compton agreed, “but I guess we’ve lifted her skirts.”

  Guilford trudged through the cool afternoon with Compton and Sullivan and their pack animals. Low clouds drifted across the sky, blindingly white at the margins, woolly gray beneath. His boots left brief imprints in the spongy meadow growth. Down a western slope of land Keck had spotted another insect midden, a ring of bone around a deceptively peaceful patch of green, like a troll’s garden, Guilford thought. They gave it a wide berth.

  Tom Compton brooded on another matter. “There have been campfires behind us the last couple of nights,” he said. “Five, six miles back. I don’t know what that means.”

  “Partisans?” Sullivan asked.

  “Probably just hunters, maybe followed us up past the Rheinfelden — followed Erasmus, more likely, poaching on his territory. The Partisans, they’re mostly coast pirates out of the rogue settlements. They don’t come inland as a rule, unless they’re hunting or prospecting, which makes them less likely to practice politics at gunpoint.”

  “Still,” Sullivan said, “I liked it better when we were alone.”

  “So did I,” the frontiersman said.

  Hill camp by a nameless creek. Land rising visibly now. Distant snow-capped alpine range. Stands of forest, mostly mosque trees, a new plant, a small bush with hard inedible yellow berries. (Not true berries, Sullivan says, but that’s what they look like.) Stiff cooling wind keeps the billyflies away, or perhaps they simply don’t care for the altitude.

  Postscriptum. Looking north at dinnertime I see what seems like all of Darwinia: a wonderful melancholy tapestry of light shadow as the sun westers. Reminds me of Montana — equally vast empty, though not so stark; cloaked in mild green, a rich and living land, however strange.

  Caroline, I think of your patience in London without me, minding Lily, putting up with Jered’s moods and Alice’s uncommunicative nature. I know how much you hated my trip out West, and that was when you still had the comforts of Boston to console you. I trust it is worth the discomfort, that my work will be in greater demand when we’re finally back home, that the upshot will be a better more secure future for both my ladies.

  Curious dreams lately, Caroline. I repeatedly dream I am wearing a military uniform, walking alone in some sere wasteland of a battlefield, lost in smoke mud. So real! Almost the quality of a memory, though of course no such thing has happened to me, the Civil War stories I heard at the family table were frankly less visceral.

  Expeditionary madness, perhaps? Dr. Sullivan also reports odd dreams, even Tom Compton grudgingly admits that his sleep is troubled.

  But how could I sleep comfortably without you next to me? In any case, daylight chases away the dreams. By day our only dream is of the mountains, their blue-white peaks our new horizon.

  Tom Compton was standing watch at dawn, when the Partisans attacked.

  He sat at the embers of a fire with Ed Betts, a rotund man whose chin kept drifting toward his chest. Betts didn’t know how to keep himself awake. Tom did. The frontiersman had stood these watches before, usually alone, wary of robbers or claim jumpers, especially when he hunted the coal country. It was a trick of the mind, to put away sleep until later. It was a skill. Betts didn’t have it.

  Still, there was no warning when the first shots came from the dim woods to the east. There was barely enough light to turn the sky an India-ink blue. Four or five rifles barked in rough unison. “What the hell,” Betts said, then slumped forward with a hole in his neck, dousing the fire with blood.

  The frontiersman rolled into the dirt. He fired his own rifle at the margin of the woods, more to wake the camp than defend it. He couldn’t see the enemy.

  The fur snakes squealed their fear and then began to die in a second volley of bullets.

  Guilford was asleep when the attack began — dreaming again of the Army picket, his twin in khaki, who was trying to deliver some vital but unintelligible message.

  Yesterday’s march had been exhausting. The expedition had followed a series of lightly wooded ridgetops and ravines, prodding the reluctant fur snakes under the arches of the mosque trees, climbing and descending. The snakes disliked the close confinement of the woods and expressed their discontent by mewling, belching, and farting. The stink was cloying in the still air and was not abated by a steady drizzle, which only added the sour-milk stench of wet fur to the mix.

  Eventually the land leveled. These high alpine meadows had blossomed in the rain, the false clover opening white star petals like summer snowflakes. Pitching tents in the drizzle was a tedious chore, and dinner came out of a can. Finch kept a lantern burning in his tent after dark — scribbling his theories, Guilford supposed, reconciling the day’s events with the dialectic of the New Creation — but everyone else simply collapsed into bedrolls and silence.

  The eastern horizon was faintly blue when the first shots were fired. Guilford came awake to the sound of cries and percussion. He fumbled for his pistol, heart hammering. He had been carrying the pistol fully loaded since Keck recovered the monster skull, but he wasn’t a marksman. He knew how to fire the pistol but had never killed anything with it.

  He rolled out of his tent into chao
s.

  The attack had come from the tree line to the east, a black silhouette against the dawn. Keck, Sullivan, Diggs, and Tom Compton had set up a sort of skirmish line behind the heaped bodies of three dead fur snakes. They were firing into the woods sporadically, starved for targets. The remaining fur snakes shrieked and yanked at their tethers in futile panic. One of the animals fell as Guilford watched.

  The rest of the expeditionaries were tumbling out of their tents in terrified confusion. Ed Betts lay dead beside the campfire, his shirt scarlet with blood. Chuck Hemphill and Ray Burke were on their hands and knees, shouting, “Get down! Keep your heads down!”

  Guilford crawled through the circle of tattered canvas to join Sullivan and company. They didn’t acknowledge his presence until he had ducked up and fired a pistol shot into the dark of the woods. Tom Compton put a hand on his arm. “You can’t shoot what you can’t see. And we’re outnumbered.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “See the muzzle flash.”

  A fresh volley of bullets answered Guilford’s single shot. The snake carcasses shook with thudding impacts.

  “Christ!” Diggs said. “What do we do?”

  Guilford glanced back at the tents. Preston Finch had just emerged, hatless and bootless, adjusting his bottle-glass lenses and firing his ivoried pistol into the air.

  “We run,” Tom Compton said.

  “Our food,” Sullivan said, “the specimens, the samples—”

  The close whine of a bullet interrupted him.

  “Fuck all that!” Diggs said.

  “Get the attention of the others,” Tom said. “Follow me.”

  The Partisans — if they were Partisans — had encircled the camp, but they were sparse on the unwooded western slope of the hill and easier to shoot. Guilford counted at least two enemy dead, though Chuck Hemphill and Emil Swensen were killed and Sullivan winged, a bloody puncture in the meat of his arm. The rest followed Tom Compton into the mist of the ravine where the sunlight had not begun to penetrate. It was a slow and agonizing route, with only the frontiersman’s shouted commands to keep the expeditionaries in any sort of order. Guilford could not seem to draw breath enough to satisfy his body; the air burned in his lungs. Shadows and fog made uneasy cover, and he heard, or imagined he heard, the sound of pursuit only paces behind him. And where was there to run? A glacial creek bisected this valley; the ridge wall beyond it was rocky and steep.

  “This way,” Tom insisted. South, parallel to the water. The soil underfoot grew marshy and perilous. Guilford could see Keck ahead of him in the swirling cloud, but nothing farther. Keep up, he told himself.

  Then Keck stopped short, peering down at his feet. “God help us,” he whispered. The texture of the ground had changed. Guilford closed in on the surveyor. Something crackled under his boots.

  Twigs. Hundreds of dried twigs.

  No: bones.

  An insect midden.

  Keck shouted at the frontiersman ahead of him. “You brought us here deliberately!”

  “Shut up.” Tom Compton was a bulky shade in the mist, someone else beside him, maybe Sullivan. “Keep quiet. Step where I step. Everybody follow the man in front of him, single file.”

  Guilford felt Diggs push him from behind. “They’re still coming, get a fuckin’ move on!”

  Never mind what might be ahead. Follow Keck, follow Tom. Diggs was right. A bullet screamed out of the fog.

  More small bones crunched underfoot. Tom was following the midden-line, Guilford guessed, circling the insect nest, one step away from oblivion.

  Keck had brought one of these bugs to the campfire a few days ago. Body about the size of a big man’s thumb, ten long and powerful legs, mandibles like steel surgical tools. Best not think about that.

  Diggs cried out as his foot slipped of fan unseen skull, sending him reeling toward the soft turf of the insect nest. Guilford grabbed one flailing arm and pulled him back.

  The sky was lighter when they reached the opposite side of the midden. Not to our advantage, Guilford thought. The Partisans might see the nest for what it was. Even then, they would be forced to follow the narrow defile of the midden-edge, either along the ravine wall as the expeditionaries had or close to the creek — either way, they might make easier targets.

  “Form a line just past these trees,” the frontiersman said. “Reload or hoard your ammunition. Shoot anyone who tries to circle around, but wait for a clean shot.”

  But the Partisans were too intent on their quarry to watch the ground. Guilford looked carefully at these men as they stepped out of the low mist and into what they must have mistaken for a rocky ledge or patch of moss. He counted seven of them, armed with military rifles but without uniforms save for high boots and slouch hats. They were grinning, sure of themselves.

  And their boots protected them — at least briefly. The lead man was perhaps three-quarters of the distance across the soft open ground before he looked down and saw the insects swarming his legs. His tight smile disappeared; his eyes widened with comprehension. He turned but couldn’t flee; the insects clung tenaciously to one another, making strands of faintly furry rope to bind his legs and drag him down.

  He lost his balance and fell screaming. The bugs were over him instantly, a roiling shroud, and on the several men behind him, whose screams shortly drowned out his own.

  “Shoot the stragglers,” Tom said. “Now.”

  Guilford fired as often as the rest, but it was the frontiersman’s rifle that found a mark most often. Three more Partisans fell; others fled the sound of screams.

  The screaming didn’t last long, mercifully. The lead man’s body, rigid with poison, angled up like the prow of a sinking ship. A glint of bone gleamed through the black swarm. Then the whole man disappeared beneath the churning moist soil.

  Guilford was transfixed. The Partisans would become part of the midden, he thought. How long until their skulls and ribs were cast up like broken coral on a beach? Hours, days? He felt ill.

  “Guilford,” Keck whispered urgently.

  Keck was bleeding vigorously from the thigh. Best bind that, Guilford thought. Staunch the blood. Where is the medical kit?

  But that wasn’t what Keck wanted to say.

  “Guilford!” Eyes wide, grimacing. “Your leg!”

  Something crawling on it.

  Maybe the insect had been thrown out of the nest by the Partisan’s thrashing. It scuttled up Guilford’s boot before he could react and drove its mandibles through the cloth of Guilford’s trousers.

  He gasped and staggered. Keck caught him under the arms. Sullivan brushed the insect away with his pistol butt, and Keck crushed it under his heel.

  “Well, damn,” Guilford said calmly. Then the venom reached an artery, a dose of hypodermic flame, and he closed his eyes and fainted.

  Interlude

  This happened near the End of Time, as the galaxy collapsed into its own singularity — a time when the stars were few and barren, a time when the galaxies themselves had grown so far apart that even distortions in the Higgs field did not propagate instantly.

  Elsewhere in the universe the voices of galactic noospheres grew faint, as they resigned themselves to dissolution or furiously constructed vast epigalactic redoubts, fortresses that would withstand both the siren song of the black holes and the thermal cooling of the universe. In time, as white dwarfs and even neutron stars dissipated and died, the only coherent matter remaining would be these strongholds of sentience.

  A trillion-year autumn had passed. Noospheres, huge constructs which housed the remnants of planetary civilizations, had drifted for eons among the fossil stars of the galaxy’s spiral arms. They had recomplicated and segmented themselves, meeting in million-year cycles to exchange knowledge and to create hybrid offspring, metacultures embedded in infant noospheres dense as neutron stars. They vectored themselves through space along distortion lines in the Higgs field, calling out across their own event horizons, singing their names. They knew e
ach other intimately. There had not been a war for countless ages — not since the self-immolation of the Violet Empire, the last of the Biotic Prefectures, 109 years ago.

  But autumn was drawing to a close, and the harsh reality of universal winter loomed ahead.

  Time to cleave together. Time to build, to restore, to protect, and to remember. Time to gather the summer’s harvest; time to conserve warmth.

  The galaxy’s noospheres shared memories that ranged back to the Eclectic Age, when death was abolished, long before the Earth or its mother star had formed. Now it was time to pool those memories — to make a physical Archive that would outlast even the loss of free energy, an Archive linked isostatically with other Archives in the universe, an Archive which would harbor sentience well into the Heat Death and might even create an artificial context in which new sentiences would eventually flourish.

  To that end noospheres gathered above the ecliptic of the dying galaxy, their immense new labors fed by plumes of antimatter that seethed from the pole of the central singularity. The Archive, when it was finished, would contain all that the galaxy had been since the Eclectic Age.

  Age by age the Archive grew, a physical object as wide as a dozen stellar systems, braced against the tides of its own mass by systematic distortions of local space. A machine operating at stellar temperatures, it radiated a burnished amber light into an increasingly lightless void — even this sparse radiation a residual inefficiency that would be eliminated over the next several million years.

  The Archive was a temporal telescope, a recording, a memory — in essence, a book. It was the ultimate history book, fed and refreshed by temporal discontinuities built into its matrix, a record of every known sentient act and thought since the dawn of the Eclectic Age. It was unalterable but infinitely accessible, aloof and antientropic.

  It was the single largest act of engineering ever attempted by galactic sentience. It pressed the noospheres to their technological limit and often, it seemed, beyond. Its construction required ceaseless work, by the noospheres and their sentient nodes, by Turing constructors large and small, by virtual machines embedded in the isostatic lattices of reality itself, a labor that endured for more than ten million years.