Darwinia

Prologue

Guilford Law turned fourteen the night the world changed.

It was the watershed of historical time, the night that divided all that followed from everything that went before, but before it was any of that, it was only his birthday. A Saturday in March, cold, under a cloudless sky as deep as a winter pond. He spent the afternoon rolling hoops with his older brother, breathing ribbons of steam into the raw air.

His mother served pork and beans for dinner, Guilford’s favorite. The casserole had simmered all day in the oven and filled the kitchen with the sweet incense of ginger and molasses. There had been a birthday present, a bound, blank book in which to draw his pictures. And a new sweater, navy blue, adult.

Guilford had been born in 1898; born, almost, with the century. He was the youngest of three. More than his brother, more than his sister, Guilford belonged to what his parents still called “the new century.” It wasn’t new to him. He had lived in it almost all his life. He knew how electricity worked. He even understood radio. He was a twentieth-century person, privately scornful of the dusty past, the gaslight and mothball past. On the rare occasions when Guilford had money in his pocket he would buy a copy of Modern Electrics and read it until the pages worked loose from the spine.

The family lived in a modest Boston town house. His Father was a typesetter in the city. His grandfather, who lived in the upstairs room next to the attic stairs, had fought in the Civil War with the 13th Massachusetts. Guilford’s mother cooked, cleaned, budgeted, and grew tomatoes and string beans in the tiny back garden. His brother, everyone said, would one day be a doctor or a lawyer. His sister was thin and quiet and read Robert Chambers novels, of which his father disapproved.

It was past Guilford’s bedtime when the sky grew very bright, but he had been allowed to stay up as part of the general mood of indulgence, or simply because he was older now. Guilford didn’t understand what was happening when his brother called everyone to the window, and when they all rushed out the kitchen door, even his grandfather, to stand gazing at the night sky,he thought at first this excitement had something to do with his birthday. The idea was wrong, he knew, but so concise. His birthday. The sheets of rainbow light above his house. All of the eastern sky was alight. Maybe something was burning, he thought. Something far off at sea.

“It’s like the aurora,” his mother said, her voice hushed and uncertain.

It was an aurora that shimmered like a curtain in a slow wind and cast subtle shadows over the whitewashed fence and the winter-brown garden. The great wall of light, now green as bottle glass, now blue as the evening sea, made no sound. It was as soundless as Halley’s Comet had been, two years ago.

His mother must have been thinking of the Comet, too, because she said the same thing she’d said back then. “It seems like the end of the world…”

Why did she say that? Why did she twist her hands together and shield her eyes? Guilford, secretly delighted, didn’t think it was the end of the world. His heart beat like a clock, keeping secret time. Maybe it was the beginning of something. Not a world ending but a new world beginning. Like the turn of a century, he thought.

Guilford didn’t fear what was new. The sky didn’t frighten him. He believed in science, which (according to the magazines) was unveiling all the mysteries of nature, eroding mankind’s ancient ignorance with its patient and persistent questions. Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity… tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.

Science meant looking — a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.

Unafraid, Guilford sat on the crumbling back steps while the others went inside to huddle in the parlor. For a moment he was happily alone, warm enough in his new sweater, the steam of his breath twining up into the breathless radiance of the sky.

Later — in the months, the years, the century of aftermath — countless analogies would be drawn. The Flood, Armageddon, the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the event itself, the terrible knowledge of it and the diffusion of that knowledge across what remained of the human world, lacked parallel or precedent.

In 1877 the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had mapped the canals of Mars. For decades afterward his maps were duplicated and refined and accepted as fact, until better lenses proved the canals were an illusion, unless Mars itself had changed since then: hardly unthinkable, in light of what happened to the Earth. Perhaps something had twined through the solar system like a thread borne on a breath of air, something ephemeral but unthinkably immense, touching the cold worlds of the outer solar system, moving through rock, ice, frozen mantle, lifeless geologies. Changing what it touched. Moving toward the Earth.

The sky had been full of signs and omens. In 1907, the Tunguska fireball. In 1910, Halley’s Comet. Some, like Guilford Law’s mother, thought it was the end of the world. Even then.

The sky that March night was brighter over the northeastern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean than it had been during the Comet’s visit. For hours, the horizon flared with blue and violet light. The light, witnesses said, was like a wall. It fell from the zenith. It divided the waters. It was visible from Khartoum (but in the northern sky) and from Tokyo (faintly, to the west).

From Berlin, Paris, London, all the capitals of Europe, the rippling light enclosed the entire span of the sky. Hundreds of thousands of spectators gathered in the streets, sleepless under the cold efflorescence. Reports flooded into New York until fourteen minutes before midnight.

At 11:46 Eastern Time, the transatlantic cable fell suddenly and inexplicably silent.

It was the era of the fabulous ships, the Great White Fleet, the Cunard and White Star liners, the Teutonic, the Mauretania, monstrosities of empire.

It was also the dawn of the age of the Marconi wireless. The silence of the Atlantic cable might have been explained by any number of simple catastrophes. The silence of the European land stations was far more ominous.

Radio operators flashed messages and queries across the cold, placid North Atlantic. There was no CQD or the new distress signal, SOS, none of the drama of a foundering ship, but certain vessels were mysteriously unresponsive, including White Star’s Olympic and Hamburg-American’s Kronprinzzessin Cecilie — flagship vessels on which, moments before, the wealthy of a dozen nations had crowded frost-rimmed rails to see the phenomenon that cast such a gaudy reflection over the winter-dark and glassy surface of the sea.

The spectacular and unexplained celestial lights vanished abruptly before dawn, scything away from the horizon like a burning blade. The sun rose into turbulent skies over most of the Great Circle route. The sea was restless, winds gusty and at times violent as the day wore on. Beyond roughly 15° west of the Prime Meridian and 40° north of the equator, the silence remained absolute and unbroken.

First to cross the boundary of what the New York wire services had already begun to call “the Wall of Mystery” was the aging White Star liner Oregon, out of New York and bound for Queenstown and Liverpool.

Her American captain, Truxton Davies, felt the urgency of the situation although he understood it no better than anyone else. He distrusted the Marconi system. The Oregon’s own radio rig was a cumbersome sparker, its range barely a hundred miles. Messages could be garbled, rumors of disaster were often exaggerated. But he had been in San Francisco in 1906, had fled along Market Street barely ahead of the flames, and he knew too well what sort of mischief nature could make, given a chance.

He had slept through the events of the night before. Let the passengers lose sleep gawking at the sky; he preferred the homely comfort of his bunk. Roused before dawn by a nervous radio operator, Davies reviewed the Marconi traffic, then ordered his Chief Engineer to stoke the boilers and his Chief Steward to boil coffee for all hands. His concern was tentative, his attitude still skeptical. Both the Olympic and the Kronprinzzessen Cecilie had been only hours east of the Oregon. If there was an authentic CQD he would have the First Officer rig the ship for rescue; until then… well, they would keep alert.

Throughout the morning he continued to monitor the wireless. It was all questions and queries, relayed with cheery but nervous greetings (“GMOM” — good morning, old man!) from the gnomish fraternity of nautical radiomen. His sense of disquiet increased. Bleary-eyed passengers, aroused by the suddenly more furious pounding of the engines, pressed him for an explanation. At lunch he told a delegation of First Class worriers that he was making up time lost due to “ice conditions” and asked them to refrain from sending cables for the time being, as the Marconi was being repaired. His stewards relayed this misinformation to Second Class and Steerage. In Davies’ experience passengers were like children, poutingly self-important but willing to accept a glib explanation if it would blunt their deep and unmentionable dread of the sea.

The gusty winds and high seas calmed by noon. A tepid sunlight pierced the ragged ceiling of cloud.

That afternoon the forward lookout reported what appeared to be wreckage, perhaps a capsized lifeboat, floating to the northeast. Davies slackened the engines and maneuvered closer. He was on the verge of ordering the boats prepared and cargo nets rigged when his Second Officer lowered his looking glass and said, “Sir, I don’t think it’s wreckage after all.”

They came alongside. It was not wreckage.

What troubled Captain Davies was that he couldn’t say what it was.

It bobbed in the swell, lazy with death, winter sunlight glistening on its long flanks. Some immense, bloated squid or octopus? Some part of some once-living thing, surely; but it resembled nothing Davies had seen in twenty-seven years at sea.

Rafe Buckley, his young First Officer, gazed at the thing as it bumped Oregon at the prow and slowly drifted aft, turning widdershins in the cold, still water. “Sir,” he said, “what do you make of it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what to make of it, Mr. Buckley.” He wished he hadn’t seen it ni the first place.

“It looks like — well, a sort of worm.”

It was segmented, annular, like a worm. But to call it a worm was to imagine a worm large enough to swallow one of the Oregon’s stacks. Surely no worm had ever sported the torn, lacy fronds — fins? a sort of gill? — that arose at intervals from the creature’s body. And there was its color, viscid pink and oily blue, like a drowned man’s thumb. And its head… if that vacuous, saw-toothed, eyeless maw could be called a head.

The worm rolled as it fell away aft, exposing a slick white belly that had been scavenged by sharks. Passengers mobbed the promenade deck, but the smell soon drove all but hardiest of them below.

Buckley stroked his moustache. “What in the name of Heaven will we tell them?”

Tell them it’s a sea monster, Davies thought. Tell them it’s a Kraken. It might even be true. But Buckley wanted a serious answer.

Davies looked a long moment at his worried First Officer. “The less said,” he suggested, “the better.”

The sea was full of mysteries. That was why Davies hated it.

Oregon was the first vessel to arrive at Cork Harbor, navigating in the cold sunrise without benefit of shore lights or channel markers. Captain Davies anchored well away from Great Island, where the docks and the busy port of Queenstown were — or should have been. And here was the unacceptable fact. There was no trace of the town. The harbor was unimproved. Where the streets of Queenstown should have been — should have teemed with exporters, cargo cranes, stevedores, emigrant Irishmen — there was only raw forest sweeping down to a rocky shore.

This was both inarguable and impossible, and even the thought of it gave Captain Davies a sensation of queasy vertigo. He wanted to believe the navigator had brought them by mistake to some wild inlet or even the wrong continent, but he could hardly deny the unmistakable outline of the island or the cloud-wracked coast of County Cork.

It was Queenstown and it was Cork Harbor and it was Ireland, except that every trace of human civilization had been obliterated and overgrown.

“But that’s not possible,” he told Buckley. “Not to belabor the obvious, but ships that left Queenstown only six days ago are at dock in Halifax. If there’d been an earthquake or a tidal wave — if we’d found the city in ruins — but this!”

Davies had spent the night with his First Officer on the bridge. The passengers, waking to the stillness of the engines, began to mob the rails again. They would be full of questions. But there was nothing to be done about it, no explanation or consolation Davies could offer or even imagine, not even a soothing lie. A wet wind had risen from the northeast. Cold would soon drive the curious to cover. Perhaps over dinner Davies could begin to calm them down. Somehow.

“And green,” he said, unable to avoid or suppress these thoughts. “Far too green for this time of year. What sort of weed springs up in March and swallows an Irish town?”

Buckley stammered, “It’s not natural.”

The two men looked at each other. The First Mate’s verdict was so obvious and so heartfelt that Davies fought an urge to laugh. He managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Perhaps tomorrow we’ll send a landing party to scout the shoreline. Until then I think we ought not to speculate… since we’re not very good at it.”

Buckley returned his smile weakly. “There’ll be other ships arriving…”

“And then we’ll know we’re not mad?”

“Well, yes, sir. That’s one way of putting it.”

“Until then let’s be circumspect. Have the wireless operator be careful what he says. The world will know soon enough.”

They gazed a few moments into the cold gray of the morning. A steward brought steaming mugs of coffee.

“Sir,” Buckley ventured, “we aren’t carrying enough coal to take us back to New York.”

“Then some other port—”

“If there is another European port.”

Davies raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t considered that. He wondered if some ideas were simply too enormous to be contained by the human skull.

He squared his shoulders. “We’re a White Star ship, Mr. Buckley. Even if they have to send colliers from America, we won’t be abandoned.”

“Yes, sir.” Buckley, a young man who had once made the mistake of studying divinity, gave the captain a plaintive look. “Sir… is this a miracle?”

“More like a tragedy, I should say. At least for the Irish.”

Rafe Buckley believed in miracles. He was the son of a Methodist minister and had been raised on Moses and the burning bush, Lazarus bidden back from the grave, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Still, he had never expected to see a miracle. Miracles, like ghost stories, made him uneasy. He preferred his miracles confined between the boards of the King James Bible, a copy of which he kept (and left shamefully unconsulted) in his cabin.

To be inside a miracle, to have it surround him from horizon to horizon, made him feel as if the floor of the world had opened under his feet. He couldn’t sleep more than a pinch. He was red-eyed and pale in the shaving mirror the next morning, and the razor trembled in his hand. He had to steady himself with a mixture of black coffee and flask whiskey before he lowered a launch from the davits, per Captain Davies’ orders, and steered a party of nervous seamen toward the pebbly beach of what had once been Great Island. A wind was rising, the water was choppy, and rain clouds came raggedly from the north. Chill, nasty weather.

Captain Davies wanted to know whether it might be practical to bring passengers ashore if the necessity arose. Buckley had doubted it to begin with; today he doubted it more than ever. He helped secure the launch above the tide, then walked a few paces up the margin of the island, his feet wet, his topcoat, hair, and moustache rimed with saltwater spray. Five grim bearded White Line sailors trudged up the gravel behind him, all speechless. This might be the place where the port of Queenstown had once stood; but Buckley felt uncomfortably like Columbus or Pizarro, alone on a new continent, the forest primeval looming before him with all its immensity and lure and threat. He called halt well before he reached the trees.

The sort-of trees. Buckley called them trees in the privacy of his mind. But it had been obvious even from the bridge of the Oregon that they were like no trees he had ever imagined, enormous blue or rust-red stalks from which needles arose in dense, bushy clusters. Some of the trees curled at the top like folded ferns, or opened into cup-shapes or bulbous, fungal domes, like the crowns of Turkish churches. The space between these growths was as close and dark as a badger hole and thick with mist. The air smelled like pine, Buckley thought, but with an odd note, bitter and strange, like menthol or camphor.

It was not what a forest ought to look like or smell like, and — perhaps worse — it was not what a forest should sound like. A forest, he thought, a decent winter forest on a windy day — the Maine forests of his childhood — ought to sound of creaking branches, the whisper of rain on leaves, or some other homely noise. But not here. These trees must be hollow, Buckley thought — the few fallen timbers at the shore had looked empty as straws — because the wind played long, low, melancholy tones on them. And the clustered needles rattled faintly. Like wooden chimes. Like bones.

The sound, more than anything, made him want to turn back. But he had orders. He steeled himself and led his expedition some yards farther up the shingle, to the verge of the alien forest, where he picked his way between yellow reeds growing knee-high from a hard black soil. He felt as if he should plant a flag… but whose? Not the Stars and Stripes, probably not even the Union Jack. Perhaps the star-and-circle of the White Star Line. We claim these lands in the name of God and J. Pierpont Morgan.

“ ’Ware your feet, sir,” the seaman behind him warned.

Buckley jerked his head down in time to see something scuttle away from his left boot. Something pale, many-legged, and nearly as long as a coal shovel. It disappeared into the reeds with a whistling screech, startling Buckley and making his heart thump.

“Jesus God!” he exclaimed. “This is far enough! It would be insane to land passengers here. I’ll tell Captain Davies—”

But the seaman was still staring.

Reluctantly, Buckley looked at the ground again.

Here was another of the creatures. Like a centipede, he thought, but fat as an anaconda, and the same sickly yellow as the weeds. That would be camouflage. Common in nature. It was interesting, in a horrible sort of way. He took a halfstep backward, expecting the thing to bolt.

It did, but not the way he expected. It moved toward him, insanely fast, and coiled up his right leg in a single sudden twining motion, like the explosive release of a spring. Buckley felt a prickle of heat and pressure as the creature pierced the cloth of his trousers and then the skin above his knee with the point of its daggerlike muzzle.

It had bit him!

He screamed and kicked. He wanted a tool to pry the monster off himself, a stick, a knife, but there was nothing to hand except these brittle, useless weeds.

Then the creature abruptly uncoiled — as if, Buckley thought, it had tasted something unpleasant — and writhed away into the undergrowth.

Buckley regained his composure and turned to face the horrified sailors. The pain in his leg was not great. He took a series of deep, lung-filling breaths. He meant to say something reassuring, to tell the men not to be frightened. But he fainted before he could muster the words.

The seamen dragged him back to the launch and sailed for the Oregon. They were careful not to touch his leg, which had already begun to swell.

That afternoon five Second-Class passengers stormed the bridge demanding to be allowed to leave the ship. They were Irishmen and they recognized Cork Harbor even in this altered guise; they had families inland and meant to go searching for survivors.

Captain Davies had taken the landing party’s report. He doubted these men would get more than a few yards inland before fear and superstition, if not the wildlife, turned them back. He stared them down and persuaded them to go belowdecks, but it was a near thing and it worried him. He distributed pistols to his chief officers and asked the wireless operator how soon they might expect to see another ship.

“Not long, sir. There’s a Canadian Pacific freighter less than an hour away.”

“Very well. You might tell them we’re waiting… and give them some warning what to expect.”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know how to say it, sir. It’s all so strange.”

Davies put his hand on the radioman’s shoulder. “No one understands it. I’ll write a message myself.”

Rafe Buckley was running a fever, but by dinner the swelling in his leg had gone down, he was ambulatory, and he insisted on accepting Davies’ offer to join him at the captain’s table for dinner.

Buckley ate sparingly, sweated profusely, and to Davies’ disappointment, spoke little. Davies had wanted to hear about what the ship’s officers were already calling “the New World.” Buckley had not only set foot on that alien soil, he had been sampled by the wildlife.

But Buckley had not finished his roast beef before he stood uncertainly and made his way back to the infirmary, where, to the Captain’s astonishment, he died abruptly at half past midnight. Damage to the liver, the ship’s surgeon speculated. Perhaps a new toxin. Difficult to say, prior to the autopsy.

It was like a dream, Davies thought, a strange and terrible dream. He cabled the ships that had begun to arrive at Queenstown, Liverpool, the French ports, with news of the death and a warning not to go ashore without, at least, hip boots and a sidearm.

White Star dispatched colliers and supply ships from Halifax and New York as the sheer enormity of what had happened began to emerge from the welter of cables and alarms. It was not just Queenstown that had gone missing; there was no Ireland, no England, no France or Germany or Italy… nothing but wilderness north from Cairo and west at least as far as the Russian steppes, as if the planet had been sliced apart and some foreign organism grafted into the wound.

Davies wrote a cable to Rafe Buckley’s father in Maine. A terrible thing to have to do, he thought, but the mourning would be far from singular. Before long, he thought, the whole world would be mourning.

Later — during the troubled times, when the numbers of the poor and the homeless rose so dramatically, when coal and oil grew so expensive, when there were bread riots in the Common and Guilford’s mother and sister left town to stay (who could say for how long?) with an aunt in Minnesota — Guilford often accompanied his father to the print shop. He couldn’t be left at home, and his school had closed during the general stroke, and his father couldn’t afford a woman to look after him. So Guilford went with his father to work and learned the rudiments of platemaking and lithography, and in the long interludes between paying jobs he re-read his radio magazines and wondered whether any of the grand wireless projects the writers envisioned would ever come to pass — whether America would ever manufacture another DeForrest tube, or whether the great age of invention had ended.

Often he listened as his father talked with the shop’s two remaining employees, a French-Canadian engraver named Ouillette and a dour Russian Jew called Kominski. Their talk was often hushed and usually gloomy. They spoke to one another as if Guilford weren’t present in the room.

They talked about the stock-market crash and the coal strike, the Workers’ Brigades and the food crisis, the escalating price of nearly everything.

They talked about the New World, the new Europe, the raw wilderness that had displaced so much of the map.

They talked about President Taft and the revolt of Congress. They talked about Lord Kitchener, presiding over the remnant British Empire from Ottawa; they talked about the rival Papacies and the colonial wars ravaging the possessions of Spain and Germany and Portugal.

And they talked, often as not, about religion. Guilford’s father was an Episcopalian by birth and a Unitarian by marriage — he held, in other words, no particular dogmatic views. Ouillette, a Catholic, called the conversion of Europe “a patent miracle.” Kominski was uneasy with these debates but freely agreed that the New World must be an act of divine intervention: what else could it be?

Guilford was careful not to interrupt or comment. He wasn’t expected to offer an opinion or even to have one. Privately, he thought all this talk of miracles was misguided. By almost any definition, of course, the conversion of Europe was a miracle, unanticipated, unexplained, and apparently well beyond the scope of natural law.

But was it?

This miracle, Guilford thought, had no signature. God had not announced it from the heavens. It had simply happened. It was an event, presaged by strange lights and accompanied by strange weather (tornadoes in Khartoum, he had read) and geological disturbances (damaging earthquakes in Japan, rumors of worse in Manchuria).

For a miracle, Guilford thought, it caused suspiciously many side effects… it wasn’t as clean and peremptory as a miracle ought to be. But when his father raised some of these same objections Kominski was scornful. “The Flood,” he said. “That was not a tidy act. The destruction of Sodom. Lot’s wife. A pillar of salt: is that logical?”

Maybe not.

Guilford went to the globe his father kept on his office desk. The first tentative newspaper drawings had shown a ring or loop scrawled over the old maps. This loop bisected Iceland, enclosed the southern tip of Spain and a half-moon of northern Africa, crossed the Holy Land, spanned in an uncertain arc across the Russian steppes and through the Arctic Circle. Guilford pressed the palm of his hand over Europe, occluding the antiquated markings. Terra incognita, he thought. The Hearst papers, following the national religious revival, sometimes jokingly called the new continent “Darwinia,” implying that the miracle had discredited natural history.

But it hadn’t. Guilford believed that quite firmly, though he didn’t dare say so aloud. Not a miracle, he thought, but a mystery. Unexplainable, but maybe not intrinsically unexplainable.

All that land mass, those ocean depths, mountains, frigid wastes, all changed in a night… Frightening, Guilford thought, and more frightening still to consider the unknown hinterlands he had covered with his hand. It made a person feel fragile.

A mystery. Like any mystery, it waited for a question. Several questions. Questions like keys, fumbled into an obstinate lock.

He closed his eyes and lifted his hand. He imagined a terrain rendered blank, the legends rewritten in an unknown language.

Mysteries beyond counting.

But how do you question a continent?