Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “The handiwork of God, Finch would say.” Since Finch was perpetually silent, I felt obliged to take his part, if only to keep Sullivan interested.

  “But what does that mean?” Sullivan stood up, nearly toppling the kettle. “How I would love to have an explanation so wonderfully complete! And I don’t mean that sarcastically, Guilford; don’t give me your sorrowful stare. I’m serious. To look at the color of Mars in the night sky, at six-legged fur-bearing snakes laying eggs in the snow, and see nothing but the hand of God… how sweetly simple!”

  “Truth is simple,” I said, smarting.

  “Truth is often simple. Deceptively simple. But I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”

  Which is what I mean, Caroline, by “principled atheism.” Sullivan is an honest man and humble about his learning. He comes from a Quaker family and will even, when he’s tired, slip into the Quaker habit of tongue. I tell thee, Guilford…

  “This city,” he brooded. “This thing we call a city, though notice, it’s nothing but boxes and alleys… no plumbing, no provision for the storage of food; no ovens, no granaries, no temples, no playing fields… this city is a key.”

  To what? I wanted to ask.

  He ignored me. “We haven’t explored it closely enough. The ruin is miles wide.”

  “Tom scouted it.”

  “Briefly. And even Tom admits…”

  Admits what? But Sullivan was sliding into introspection and it would have been useless to push him. I knew his moods too well.

  For many of us Darwinia has been a test of faith. Finch believes the continent is a patent miracle, but I suspect he wishes God had left a signature less ambiguous than these wordless hills and forests. Whereas Sullivan is forced into a daily wrestle with the miraculous.

  We drank our tea and shivered under our Army blankets. Tom Compton had insisted we keep a night watch ever since the Partisan attack. Two men by the midnight fire was our best effort. I often wondered what we were watching for, exactly, since another attack, had it come, would have overwhelmed our defenses whether or not there was time to rouse the sleeping men.

  But the city has a way of provoking wariness.

  “Guilford,” Sullivan said after a long silence. “When you sleep, these days… do you dream?”

  The question surprised me.

  “Seldom,” I said.

  But that was a lie.

  Dreams are trivial, Caroline, aren’t they?

  I don’t believe in dreams. I don’t believe in the Army picket who looks like me, even if I see him whenever I close my eyes. Fortunately Sullivan didn’t press the matter, and we sat out what remained of our watch without speaking.

  Mid-January. Unexpected bounty from the last hunting expedition: plenty of dressed meat, winter seeds, even a couple of Darwinian “birds” — moth-hawks, brainless bipedal leather-winged creatures, but they taste like lamb, of all things, juicy and succulent. Everyone ate to contentment except Paul Robertson, who is down with the flu. Even Finch smiled his approval.

  Sullivan still talks of exploring the ruins — he is almost obsessed with the idea. And now, with our larders bolstered and the weather taking a mild turn, he means to put his plan into action.

  For spare hand and litter bearer he has enlisted Tom Compton and me. We set out tomorrow, a two-day expedition into the heart of the city.

  I hope this is wise. I dread it a little, to be honest.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was an unseasonably cold London winter, more bitter than any of the Boston winters Caroline remembered. A wolf-winter, Aunt Alice called it. Supply boats came less frequently up the ice-choked Thames, though the harbor boiled with industry and smokestacks blackened the sky. Every building in London added a plume of coal smoke or the grayer smudge of a peat or wood fire. Caroline had learned to take some solace in these sullen skies, emblems of a wilderness beaten back. She understood now what London really was: not a “settlement” — who, after all, would want to settle in this unproductive, vile country? — but a gesture of defiance toward an intractable nature.

  Nature would win, of course, in the end. Nature always did. But Caroline learned to take a secret pleasure in each paved road and toppled tree.

  A mid-January steamer arrived with a shipment of stock Jered had ordered last summer. There were enormous spools of chain and rope, penny nails, pitch and tar, brushes and brooms. Jered hired a truck from the warehouse to the store every morning for a week, replacing sold-through inventory. Today he unloaded the last of the supplies into the stockroom and paid the teamster, whose horses snorted fog into a brisk back-alley wind, while Caroline and Alice arranged the shelves indoors. Aunt Alice worked tirelessly, dusted her hands on her apron, spoke seldom.

  She avoided Caroline’s eyes. She had been like this for months: cold, disapproving, brusquely polite.

  They had argued at first, after the shock of the Partisan attack on the Weston. Alice refused to believe Guilford was dead. She was resolute on the matter.

  Caroline knew quite simply and plainly that Guilford had died; she had known it from the moment Jered had told about the Weston, though that was proof of nothing; the expedition itself had been put ashore upriver. But even Jered acknowledged that they would have been easy prey for determined thieves. Caroline kept her feelings to herself, at least at first. But in her heart she was a widow well before the summer ended.

  No one else conceded the truth. There was always hope. But September passed without word, and hopes dimmed with autumn and vanished, for all practical purposes, by winter.

  Nothing had been proven, Alice said. Miracles were possible. “A wife ought to have faith,” she told Caroline.

  But sometimes a woman knows better.

  The argument wasn’t settled, couldn’t be settled. They simply ceased to speak of it; but it colored every conversation, cast its shadow over the dinner table and insinuated itself between the ticking of the clock. Caroline had taken to wearing black. Alice kept Guilford’s suitcase in the hallway closet as an object lesson.

  But more than that weary disagreement was bothering Alice today, Caroline thought.

  She had a clue before the morning’s work was finished. Alice went to the counter to serve a customer and came back to the storeroom wearing the pinched look that meant she had something unpleasant to say. She narrowed her eyes on Caroline, while Caroline tried not to flinch.

  “It’s bad enough to grieve,” Alice said grimly, “when you don’t know for a fact that he’s dead. But it’s worse, Caroline — far, far worse — to finish grieving.”

  And Caroline thought, She knows.

  Not that it mattered.

  That evening, Jered and Alice took themselves to the Crown and Reed, the local pub. When she was certain they were gone, Caroline escorted Lily downstairs and briefly into the cold street, to a neighbor, a Mrs. de Koenig, who charged a Canadian dollar to look after the girl and keep quiet about it. Caroline told Lily good-bye, then buttoned her own jacket and hood against the winter chill.

  Stars shivered above the frozen cobbles. Gas lamps cast a wan light across crusts of snow. Caroline hurried into the wind, fighting a surge of guilt. Contagion from her aunt, she thought, this feeling of wickedness. She was not doing anything wicked. She couldn’t be. Guilford was dead. Her husband was dead. She had no husband.

  Colin Watson stood waiting at the corner of Market and Thames. He embraced her briefly, then hailed a cab. He smiled as he helped her up, the smile a jejune thing half-hidden by his ridiculous moustache. Caroline supposed he was suppressing his natural melancholy for her. His hands were large and strong.

  Where would he take her tonight? For a drink, she thought (though not at the Crown and Reed). A talk. That was all. He needed to talk. He was thinking of resigning his commission. He’d been offered a civilian job at the docks. He hadn’t lived in Jered’s storeroom since last September; he had taken a room at the Empire and was alo
ne most nights.

  That made things easier — a room of his own.

  She couldn’t stay with him as long as she would have liked. Jered and Alice mustn’t know what she was doing. Or, if they knew, there must be at least a certain doubt, a gap of uncertainty she could defend.

  But she wanted to stay. Colin was kind to her, a sort of kindness Guilford had never understood. Colin accepted her silences and didn’t try to pry them open, as Guilford had. Guilford had always believed her moods reflected some failure of his own. He was solicitous — thoughtful, certainly, after his own lights — but she would have liked to weep occasionally without triggering an apology.

  Lieutenant Watson, tall and sturdy but with moods of his own, allowed Caroline the privacy of her grief. Perhaps, she thought, it was how a gentleman treated a widow. The upheaval of the world had cracked the foundations of civility, but some men were still gentle. Some still asked before they touched. Colin was gentle. She liked his eyes best of all. They watched her attentively even as his hands roamed freely; they understood; ultimately, they forgave. It seemed to Caroline there was no sin in the world those quiet blue eyes couldn’t redeem.

  She stayed too late and drank more than she should have. They made scalding, desperate love. Her Lieutenant put her in a cab, when she insisted, an hour later than she had planned, but she made the cabbie let her off a block before Market. She didn’t want to be seen climbing out of a hansom at this hour. Somehow, obscurely, it implied vice. So she walked off-balance into the teeth of the wind before reclaiming Lily from Mrs. de Koenig, who wheedled another dollar from her.

  Jered and Alice were home, of course. Caroline struggled to maintain her dignity while she put away her coat and Lily’s, saying nothing except to soothe her daughter. Jered closed his book and announced tonelessly that he was going to bed. He stumbled on the way out of the room. He’d been drinking, too.

  But if Alice had, she didn’t show it. “That little girl needs her sleep,” she said flatly. “Don’t you, Lily?”

  “I’ll put her to bed,” Caroline said.

  “She doesn’t look like she needs much putting. Asleep on her feet, at this hour. Bed’s warm and waiting, Lily! You go along, love, all right?”

  Lily yawned agreeably and waddled off, leaving her mother defenseless.

  “She slept late this morning,” Caroline offered.

  “She’s not sleeping well at all. She’s afraid for her father.”

  “I’m tired, too,” Caroline said.

  “But not too tired to commit adultery?”

  Caroline stared, hoping she hadn’t heard correctly.

  “To fornicate with a man not your husband,” Alice said. “Do you have another word for it?”

  “This is beneath you.”

  “Perhaps you should find another place to sleep. I’ve written Liam in Boston. He’ll want you home as soon as we can book passage. I’ve had to apologize. On your behalf.”

  “You had no right to do that.”

  “Every right, I think.”

  “Guilford is dead!” It was her only counterargument, and she regretted using it so hastily. It lost its gravity, somehow, in this under-heated parlor.

  Alice sniffed. “You can’t possibly know that.”

  “I feel the loss of him every day. Of course I know it.”

  “Then you have a funny way of grieving.” Alice stood up, not concealing her anger. “Who told you you were special, Caroline? Was it Liam? I suppose he treated you that way, walled you up in his big Boston house, the suffering orphan. But everyone lost someone that night, some more than their parents… some of us lost everything we loved, every person and every place, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and some of us didn’t have wealthy relations to dry our eyes and servants to make our comfortable beds.”

  “Unfair!”

  “We don’t get to make the rules, Caroline. Only keep them or break them.”

  “I won’t be a widow for the rest of my life!”

  “Probably not. But if you had any sense of decency at all you might think twice before conducting an affair with a man who helped murder your husband.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

  The voice seemed to condense out of the tavern air, smoky, liquid, and ingratiating. But it wasn’t a message Vale wanted to hear. How best to sum up his response?

  Be succinct, he thought. “Please fuck off.”

  A figure took the stool beside him. “That’s not called for, is it? Really, don’t mind me, Elias. I’m only here to chat.”

  Groaning, he turned his head. “Do I know you?”

  The man was tall. He was also suave, carefully dressed, and handsome. Though perhaps not as handsome as he seemed to think, flashing those horsey white teeth like beacon lights. Vale guessed he was twenty-two, twenty-three — young, and far too confident for his age.

  “No, you don’t know me. Timothy Crane.”

  Hand like a piano player’s. Long bony fingers. Vale ignored it. “Fuck off,” he repeated.

  “Elias, I’m sorry, but I have to talk to you whether you like it or not.” The accent was New England, maddeningly aristocratic.

  “Who are you, one of the Sanders-Moss nephews?”

  “Sorry. No relation. But I know who you are.” Crane leaned closer. Dangerously close. His breath tickled the fine hair on Vale’s right ear. “You’re the man who speaks to the dead.”

  “I’m the man who would like to convince you to fuck off.”

  “The man who has a god inside him. A painful and demanding god. At least if it’s anything like mine.”

  Crane had a cab waiting at the curb. Jesus Christ, Vale thought, What now? He had the blurred sensation of events accelerating beyond his comprehension. He gave the cabbie his home address and settled in next to this grinning jackanapes.

  It had been a quiet autumn, a quieter winter. The gods followed their own agenda, Vale supposed, and although the game with Eugene Randall had not played itself out — there had been two more séances, to no visible effect — the resolution seemed comfortably distant. Vale had even entertained the wistful notion that his god might be losing interest in him.

  Apparently not.

  The chatty Mr. Crane shut up in the presence of the driver. Vale tried to force himself sober — braced his shoulders, frowned and blinked — as the taxi crawled past electric light standards, globes of ice suspended in the frigid night. Washington winters weren’t supposed to be so cruel.

  They arrived eventually at Vale’s town house. The street was quiet, all windows primly dark. Crane paid the cabbie, removed two immense suitcases from the vehicle, lugged them through Vale’s front door, and dropped them insolently next to the umbrella stand.

  “Staying a while?”

  “Afraid so, old chap.”

  Old chap? Preserve me, Vale thought. “Do we have that much to talk about?”

  “Lots. But it can wait until morning. Suppose you get a good night’s sleep, Elias. You’re really in no condition. We can discuss this when we’re both more refreshed. Don’t worry about me! I’ll curl up on the sofa. No formalities between us.”

  And damned if he didn’t stretch out on the velvet settee, still smiling.

  “Look here. I’m too tired to throw you out. If you’re still here in the morning—”

  “We’ll talk about it then. Fine idea.”

  Vale threw up his hands and left the room.

  Morning arrived, for Elias Vale, just shy of noon.

  Crane was at the breakfast table. He had showered and shaved. His hair was combed. His shirt was crisp. He poured himself a cup of coffee.

  Vale was faintly aware of the stale sweat cooking out of his own clogged pores. “How long do you imagine you’re staying?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “A week? A month?”

  Shrug.

  “Maybe you’re not aware of this, Mr. Crane, but I live alone. Because I like it that way. I don
’t want a houseguest, even under these, uh, circumstances. And frankly, nobody asked me.”

  “Not their style, is it?”

  The gods, he meant.

  “You’re saying I have no choice?”

  “I wasn’t offered one. Toast, Elias?”

  Two of us, Vale thought. He hadn’t anticipated that. Though of course it made sense. But how many more god-stricken individuals were out there walking the streets? Hundreds? Thousands?

  He folded his hands. “Why are you here?”

  “The eternal question, isn’t it? I’m not sure I know. Not yet, at least. I gather you’re meant to introduce me around.”

  “As what, my catamite?”

  “Cousin, nephew, illegitimate child…”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll do as we’re told, when the time comes.” Crane put down the butter knife. “Honestly, Elias, it’s not my choice either. And I suspect it’s temporary. No offense.”

  “No offense, but I hope so.”

  “In the meantime we’ll have to find a bed for me. Unless you want my luggage cluttering up your front room. Do you entertain clients here?”

  “Often. How much do you know about me, anyway?”

  “A little. What do you know about me?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Ah.”

  Vale made a desperate last try. “Isn’t there a hotel in town—?”

  “Not what they want.” The smile again. “For better or worse, our fates appear to be intertwined.”

  The astonishing thing was that Vale did get used to Crane’s occupation of his attic room, at least in the way one grows accustomed to a chronic headache. Crane was a considerate houseguest, more meticulous than Vale about cleaning up after himself, careful not to interrupt when Vale was with paying customers. He did insist on being taken to the Sanders-Moss salon and introduced as Vale’s “cousin,” a financier. Fortunately Crane seemed to have genuine working knowledge of banking and Wall Street, almost as if he had been raised to it. And maybe he had. He was vague about his past but hinted at family connections.