Darwinia (6 page)

But it was also a lively and good-natured town, and Guilford was greeted cheerfully by other pedestrians. He stopped for lunch at a Ludgate pub and emerged refreshed into the sunlight. Beyond the new St. Paul’s the town faded into tar-paper shacks, farm clearances, finally patches of raw forest. The road became a rutted dirt path, mosque trees shaded the lane with their green coronets, and the air was suddenly much fresher.

The generally accepted explanation for the Miracle was that it had been just that: an act of divine intervention on a colossal scale. Preston Finch believed so, and Finch was not an idiot. And on the face of it, the argument was unimpeachable. An event had taken place in defiance of everything commonly accepted as natural law; it had fundamentally transformed a generous portion of the Earth’s surface in a single night. Its only precedents were Biblical. After the conversion of Europe, who could be skeptical of the Flood, for instance, particularly when naturalists like Finch were prepared to tease evidence for it from the geological record? Man proposes, God disposes; His motives might be obscure but His handiwork was unmistakable.

But Guilford could not stand among these gently swaying alien growths and believe they did not have a history of their own.

Certainly Europe had been remade in 1912; just as certainly, these very trees had appeared there in a night, eight years younger than he found them now. But they did not seem new-made. They generated seed (spores, more precisely, or
germinae
in the new taxonomy), which implied heritage, history, descent, perhaps even evolution. Cut one of these trees across the bole and you would find annular growth rings numbering far more than eight. The annular rings might be large or small, depending on seasonal temperatures and sunlight… depending on seasons that had happened
before these plants appeared on Earth.

So where had they come from?

He paused at the roadside where a stand of gullyflowers grew almost to shoulder height. In one cuplike bud, a threadneedle crawled among blue stamenate spikes. With each movement of the insect tiny clouds of germinal matter dusted the warm spring air. To call this “supernatural,” Guilford thought, was to contradict the very idea of nature.

On the other hand, what limits applied to divine intervention? None, presumably. If the Creator of the Universe wanted to give one of his creations the false appearance of a history, He would simply do so; human logic was surely the least of His concerns. God might have made the world just yesterday, for that matter, assembled it out of stardust and divine will complete with the illusion of human memory. Who would know? Had Caesar or Cleopatra ever really lived? Then what about the people who vanished the night of the Conversion? If the Miracle had engulfed the entire planet rather than one part of it surely the answer would be
no
— no Guilford Law, no Woodrow Wilson, no Edison or Marconi; no Rome, no Greece, no Jerusalem; no Neanderthal Man. For that matter, no Adam, no Eve.

And if that’s so
, Guilford thought,
then we live in a madhouse.
There could be no genuine understanding of anything, ever… except perhaps in the Mind of God.

In which case we should simply give up.
Knowledge was provisional at best and science was an impracticality. But he refused to believe it.

He was distracted from gullyflowers and philosophy by the smell of smoke. He followed the lane up a gentle hillside, to an open field where mosque and bell trees had been cut, stacked with dry brush, and set ablaze. A gang of soot-blackened workingmen stood at the verge of the road minding the fires.

A husky man in dungarees and a sailor’s jersey — the crew boss, Guilford supposed — waved him over impatiently. “Burn’s just on, I’m afraid. Best stay behind the beaters or turn back. One or two might get past us.”

Guilford said, “One or two what?”

This drew a chorus of laughter from the men, some half-dozen of whom carried thick wooden posts blunted at one end.

The Crew boss said, “You’re an American?”

Guilford acknowledged it.

“New here?”

“Fairly new. What is it I’m supposed to watch out for?”

“Stump runners, for Christ’s sake. Look at you, you’re not even wearing knee boots! Keep off the clearances unless you’re dressed for it. It’s safe enough when we’re cutting and stacking, but the fires always draw ’em out. Stay behind the beaters until the flush is finished and you’ll be all right.”

Guilford stood where the crew boss directed him, with the workmen forming a skirmish line between the road and the cleared lot. The sun was warm, the smoke chokingly thick whenever the wind reversed. Guilford had started to wonder whether the waiting would go on all afternoon when one of the laborers shouted “ ’Ware!” and faced the clearing, knees braced, his frayed wooden post at quarter-arms.

“Buggers live in the earth,” the crew boss said. “Fire boils ’em out. You don’t want to get in the way.”

Beyond the workers he saw motion in the charred soil of the clearing. Stump runners, if Guilford remembered correctly, were burrowing hive insects about the size of a large beetle, commonly found among the roots of older mosque trees. Seldom a problem to the casual passerby, but venomous when provoked. And fiercely toxic.

There must have been a dozen flourishing nests in the clearance.

The insects came from the earth in mounds and filled the smoldering spaces between the fires like shimmering black oil. The clearing yielded several distinct swarms, which turned, collided, and wheeled in every direction.

The beaters began pounding the dirt with their posts. They pounded in unison, raising clouds of dust and ash and shouting like madmen. The crew boss took a firm grip on Guilford’s arm. “Don’t move!” he roared. “You’re safe here. They’d attack us if they could, but their first concern is moving their egg sacks away from the flames.”

The beaters in their high boots continued punishing the earth until the stump-runners paid attention. The swarms rotated around the brush fires like living cyclones, pressed together until the ground was invisible under their combined mass, then turned away from the tumult of the beaters and flowed into the shadows of the forest like so much water draining from a pond.

“A loose hive won’t last long. They’re prey for snakes, scuttlemice, billy hawks, anything that can tolerate their poison. We’ll rake the fires for a day or two. Come back in a week, you won’t recognize the place.”

The work continued until the last of the creatures had disappeared. The beaters leaned panting against their posts, exhausted but relieved. The insects had left their own smell in the smoky air, a tang of mildew, Guilford thought, or ammonia. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, realized his face was covered with soot.

“Next time you come away from town, outfit yourself for it. This isn’t New York City.”

Guilford smiled weakly. “I’m beginning to understand that.”

“Here for long?”

“A few months. Here and on the Continent.”

“The Continent! There’s nothing on the Continent but wilderness and crazy Americans, excuse me for saying so.”

“I’m with a scientific survey.”

“Well, I hope you don’t plan on doing much walking with ankleboots like those on your feet. The livestock will kill you and whittle your pins.”

“Maybe a little walking,” Guilford said.

He was glad enough to find his way back to the Pierce home, to wash himself and spend an evening in the buttery light of the oil lamps. After a generous supper Caroline and Alice disappeared into the kitchen, Lily was sent to bed, and Jered took down from his shelf a leather-bound 1910 atlas of Europe, the old Europe of sovereigns and nation. How meaningless it had come to be, Guilford thought, and in just eight years, these diagrams of sovereignty imposed on the land like the whim of a mad god. Wars had been fought for these lines. Now they were so much geometry, a tile of dreams.

“It hasn’t changed as much as you might think,” Jered said. “Old loyalties don’t die easily. You know about the Partisans.”

The Partisans were bands of nationalists — rough men who had come from the colonies to reclaim territory they still thought of as German or Spanish or French. Most disappeared into the Darwinian bush, reduced to subsistence or devoured by the wildlife. Others practiced a form of banditry, preying on settlers they regarded as invaders. The Partisans were certainly a potential threat — coastal piracy, abetted by various European nations in exile, made resupply problematic. But the Partisans, like other settlers, had yet to penetrate into the roadless interior of the continent.

“That may not be true,” Jered said. “They’re well armed, some of them, and I’ve heard rumors of Partisan attacks on wildcat miners in the Saar. They’re not kindly disposed toward Americans.”

Guilford wasn’t intimidated. The Donnegan party had not encountered more than a few ragged Partisans living like savages in the Aquitaine lowlands. The Finch expedition would land on the continent at the mouth of the Rhine, American-occupied territory, and follow the river as far as it was navigable, past the Rheinfelden to the Bodensee, if possible. Then they would scout the Alps for a navigable pass where the old Roman roads had run.

“Ambitious,” Jered said evenly.

“We’re equipped for it.”

“Surely you can’t anticipate every danger…”

“That’s the point. People have been crossing the Alps for centuries. It’s not such a hard journey in summer. But never these Alps. Who knows what might have changed? That’s what we mean to find out.”

“Just fifteen men,” Jered said.

“We’ll steam as far as we can up the Rhine. Then it’s flat-bottom boats and portage.”

“You’ll need someone who knows the Continent. What little of it anyone does know.”

“There are trappers and bush runners at Jeffersonville on the Rhine. Men who’ve been there since the Miracle, nearly.”

“You’re the photographer, Caroline tells me.”

“Yessir.”

“First time out?”

“First time on the Continent, but I was with Walcott at the Gallatin River last year. I’m not inexperienced.”

“Liam helped you secure this position?”

“Yes.”

“No doubt he thought he was doing the right thing. But Liam is insulated by the Atlantic Ocean. And by his money. He may not understand the position he’s put you in. Passions run high on the continent. Oh, I know all about the Wilson Doctrine, Europe a wilderness open for resettlement by all, and so on, and it’s a noble idea in its way — though I’m glad England was able to enforce an exception. But you had to sink a few French and German gunboats before their rump governments would yield. And even so…” He tamped his pipe. “You’re going in harm’s way. I’m not sure Liam knows that.”

“I’m not afraid of the continent.”

“Caroline needs you. Lily needs you. There’s nothing cowardly about protecting yourself and your family.” He leaned closer. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as necessary. I can write to Liam and explain. Think about it, Guilford.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t want my niece to be a widow.”

Caroline came through the door from the kitchen. She looked at Guilford solemnly, her lovely hair awry, then turned up the gaslights one by one until the room was ablaze with light.

Spending time at the Sanders-Moss estate was much like having his testicles removed. Among the women he was a pet; among the men, a eunuch.

Hardly flattering, Elias Vale thought, but not unexpected. He entered the house as a eunuch because no other entrance was open to him. Given time, he would own the doors. He would topple the palace, if it pleased him. The harem would be his and the princes would vie for his favor.

Tonight was a
soirée
celebrating some occasion he had already forgotten: a birthday, an anniversary. Since he wouldn’t be required to offer a toast, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Mrs. Sanders-Moss had once again invited him to adorn one of her functions; that she trusted him to be acceptably eccentric, to charm but not to embarrass. That is, he wouldn’t drink to excess, make passes at wives, or treat the powerful as equals.

At dinner he sat where he was directed, entertaining a congressman’s daughter and a junior Smithsonian administrator with stories of table-rapping and spirit manifestations, all safely second-hand and wry. Spiritualism was a heresy in these lately pious times, but it was an American heresy, more acceptable than Catholicism, for instance, with its Latin Masses and absent European Popes. And when he had fulfilled his function as a curio he simply smiled and listened to the conversation that flowed around his unobstructing presence like a river around a rock.

The hard part, at least at first, had been maintaining his poise in the presence of so much luxury. Not that he was entirely a stranger to luxury. He had been raised in a good enough New England home — had fallen from it like a rebel angel. He knew a dinner fork from a dessert fork. But he had slept under a great many cold bridges since then, and the Sanders-Moss estate was an order of magnitude more grandiose than anything he remembered. Electric lights and servants; beef sliced thin as paper; mutton dressed with mint sauce.

Waiting table was Olivia, a pretty and timid Negress whose cap sat perpetually askew on her head. Vale had pressed Mrs. Sanders-Moss not to punish her after the christening dress was rescued, which accomplished two purposes at once, to spotlight his kindheartedness and to ingratiate himself with the help, never a bad thing. But Olivia still avoided him assiduously; she seemed to think he was an evil spirit. Which was not far from the truth, though Vale would quibble with the adjective. The universe was aligned along axes more complex than poor simple Olivia would ever know.

Olivia brought the dessert course. Table talk turned to the Finch expedition, which had reached England and was preparing to cross the Channel. The congressman’s daughter to Vale’s left thought it was all very brave and interesting. The junior administrator of mollusks, or whatever he was, thought the expedition would be safer on the continent than in England.