Darwinia

Chapter One

The men who crewed the surviving steamships had invented their own legends. Tall tales, all blatantly untrue, and Guilford Law had heard most of them by the time the Odense passed the fifteenth meridian.

A drunken deck steward had told him about the place where the two oceans meet: the Old Atlantic of the Americas and the New Atlantic of Darwinia. The division, the steward said, was plain as a squall line and twice as treacherous. One sea was more viscid than the other, like oil, and creatures attempting the passage inevitably died. Consequently the zone was littered with the bodies of animals both familiar and strange: dolphins, sharks, rorqual whales, blue whales, anguilates, sea barrels, blister fish, banner fish. They floated in place, milky eyes agape, flank against flank and nose to tail. They were unnaturally preserved by the icy water, a solemn augury to vessels unwise enough to make the passage through their close and stinking ranks.

Guilford knew perfectly well the story was a myth, a horror story to frighten the gullible. But like any myth, taken at the right time, it was easy to believe. He leaned into the tarnished rail of the Odense near sunset, mid-Atlantic. The wind carried whips of foam from a cresting sea, but to the west the clouds had opened and the sun raked long fingers over the water. Somewhere beyond the eastern horizon was the threat and promise of the new world, Europe transformed, the miracle continent the newspapers still called Darwinia. There might not be blister fish crowding the keel of the ship, and the same salt water lapped at every terrestrial shore, but Guilford knew he had crossed a real border, his center of gravity shifting from the familiar to the strange.

He turned away, his hands as chill as the brass of the rail. He was twenty-two years old and had never been to sea before Friday last. Too tall and gaunt to make a good sailor, Guilford disliked maneuvering himself through the shoulder-bruising labyrinths of the Odense, which had done yeoman duty for a Danish passenger line in the years before the Miracle. He spent most of his time in the cabin with Caroline and Lily, or, when the cold wasn’t too forbidding, here on deck. The fifteenth meridian was the western extremity of the great circle that had been carved into the globe, and beyond this point he hoped he might catch a glimpse of some Darwinian sea life. Not a thousand dead anguilates “tangled like a drowned woman’s hair,” but maybe a barrelfish surfacing to fill its lung sacs. He was anxious for any token of the new continent, even a fish, though he knew his eagerness was naive and he took pains to conceal it from other members of the expedition.

The atmosphere belowdecks was steamy and close. Guilford and family had been allotted a tiny cabin midships; Caroline seldom left it. She had been seasick the first day out of Boston Harbor. She was better now, she insisted, but Guilford knew she wasn’t happy. Nothing about this trip had made her happy, even though she had practically willed herself aboard.

Still, walking into the room where she waited was like falling in love all over again. Caroline sat with back arched at the edge of the bed, combing her hair with a mother-of-pearl brush, the brush following the curve of her neck in slow, meditative strokes. Her large eyes were half-lidded. She looked like a princess in an opium reverie: aloof, dreamy, perpetually sad. She was, Guilford thought, quite simply beautiful. He felt, not for the first time, the urge to photograph her. He had taken a portrait of her shortly before their wedding, but the result hadn’t satisfied him. Dry plates lost the nuance of expression, the luxury of her hair, seven shades of black.

He sat beside her and resisted the urge to touch her bare shoulder above her camisole. Lately she had not much welcomed his touch.

“You smell like the sea,” she said.

“Where’s Lily?”

“Answering a call of nature.”

He moved to kiss her. She looked at him, then offered her cheek. Her cheek was cool.

“We should dress for dinner,” she said.

Darkness cocooned the ship. The sparse electric lights narrowed corridors into shadow. Guilford took Caroline and Lily to the dim chamber that passed for a dining room and joined a handful of the expedition’s scientists at the table of the ship’s surgeon, a corpulent and alcoholic Dane.

The naturalists were discussing taxonomy. The doctor was talking about cheese.

“But if we create a whole new Linnean system—”

“Which is what the situation calls for!”

“ — there’s the risk of suggesting a connectivity of descent, the familiarity of otherwise well-defined species…”

“Gjedsar cheese! In those days we had Gjedsar cheese even at the breakfast table. Oranges, ham, sausage, rye bread with red caviar. Every meal a true frokost. Not this mean allowance. Ah!” The doctor spotted Guilford. “Our photographer. And his family. Lovely lady! The little miss!”

The diners stood and shuffled to make room. Guilford had made friends among the naturalists, particularly the botanist named Sullivan. Caroline, though she was obviously a welcome presence, had little to say at these meals. But it was Lily who had won over the table. Lily was barely four years old, but her mother had taught her the rudiments of decorum, and the scientists didn’t mind her inquisitiveness… with the possible exception of Preston Finch, the expedition’s senior naturalist, who had no knack with children. But Finch was at the opposite end of the long trestle, monopolizing a Harvard geologist. Lily sat beside her mother and opened her napkin methodically. Her shoulders barely reached the plane of the table.

The doctor beamed — a little drunkenly, Guilford thought. “Young Lilian is looking hungry. Would you like a pork chop, Lily? Yes? Meager but edible. And applesauce?”

Lily nodded, trying not to flinch.

“Good. Good. Lily, we are halfway across the big sea. Halfway to the big land of Europe. Are you happy?”

“Yes,” Lily obliged. “But we’re only going to England. Just Daddy’s going to Europe.”

Lily, like most people, had come to distinguish between England and Europe. Though England was just as much changed by the Miracle as Germany or France, it was the English who had effectively enforced their territorial claims, rebuilding London and the coastal ports and maintaining close control of their naval fleet.

Preston Finch began to pay attention. From the foot of the table, he frowned through his wire-brush moustache. “Your daughter makes a false distinction, Mr. Law.”

Table talk on the Odense hadn’t been as vigorous as Guilford anticipated. Part of the problem was Finch himself, author of Appearance and Revelation, the ur-text of Noachian naturalism even before the Miracle of 1912. Finch was tall, gray, humorless, and ballooned with his own reputation. His credentials were impeccable; he had spent two years along the Colorado and the Rouge Rivers collecting evidence of global flooding, and had been a major force in the Noachian Revival since the Miracle. The others all had the slightly hangdog manner of reformed sinners, to one degree or another, save for the botanist, Dr. Sullivan, who was older than Finch and felt secure enough to badger him with the occasional quote from Wallace or Darwin. Reformed evolutionists with less tenure had to be more careful. Altogether, the situation made for some tense and cautious talk.

Guilford himself mainly kept quiet. The expedition’s photographer wasn’t expected to render scientific opinions, and maybe that was for the best.

The ship’s surgeon scowled at Finch and made a bid for Caroline’s attention. “Have you arranged lodging in London, Mrs. Law?”

“Lily and I will be with a relative,” Caroline said.

“So! An English cousin! Soldier, trapper, or shopkeeper? There are only the three sorts of people in London.”

“I’m sure you’re right. The family keeps a hardware store.”

“You’re a brave woman. Life on the frontier…”

“It’s only for a time, Doctor.”

“While the men hunt snarks!” Several of the naturalists looked at him blankly. “Lewis Carroll! An Englishman! Are you all ignorant?”

Silence. Finally Finch spoke up. “European authors aren’t held in high regard in America, Doctor.”

“Of course. Pardon me. A person forgets. If a person is lucky.” The surgeon looked at Caroline defiantly. “London was once the largest city in the world. Did you know that, Mrs. Law? Not the rough thing it is now. All shacks and privies and mud. But I wish I could show you Copenhagen. That was a city! That was a civilized city.”

Guilford had met people like the surgeon. There was one in every waterfront bar in Boston. Castaway Europeans drinking grim toasts to London or Paris or Prague or Berlin, looking for some club to join, a Loyal Order of this or that, a room where they could hear their language spoken as if it weren’t a dead or dying tongue.

Caroline ate quietly, and even Lily was subdued, the whole table subtly aware that they had passed the halfway mark, mysteries ahead looming suddenly larger than the gray certainties of Washington or New York. Only Finch seemed unaffected, discussing the significance of gun-flint chert at a fierce pitch with anyone who cared to listen.

Guilford had first laid eyes on Preston Finch in the offices of Atticus and Pierce, a Boston textbook publisher. Liam Pierce had introduced them. Guilford had been west last year with Walcott, official photographer for the Gallatin River and Deep Creek Canyon surveys. Finch was organizing an expedition to chart the hinterlands of southern Europe, and he had well-heeled backers and support from the Smithsonian Institution. There was an opening for an experienced photographer. Guilford qualified, which was probably why Pierce introduced him to Finch, though it was possible the fact that Pierce happened to be Caroline’s uncle had something to do with it.

In fact, Guilford suspected Pierce just wanted him out of town for another spell. The successful publisher and his nephew-in-law didn’t always get along, though both cared genuinely for Caroline. Nevertheless, Guilford was grateful for the opportunity to join Finch in the new world. The pay was good, by current standards. The work might make him a modest reputation. And he was fascinated by the continent. He had read not only the reports of the Donnegan expedition (along the skirts of the Pryenees, Bordeaux to Perpigna, 1918) but (secretly) all the Darwinian tales in Argosy and All-Story Weekly, especially the ones by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

What Pierce had not counted on was Caroline’s stubbornness. She would not be left alone with Lily a second time, even for a season, no matter the money involved or the repeated offers to hire a day maid for her. Nor did Guilford especially want to leave her, but this expedition was the hinge point of his career, maybe the difference between poverty and security.

But she would not be lenient. She threatened (though this made no sense) to leave him. Guilford answered all her objections calmly and patiently, and she yielded not an inch.

In the end she agreed to a compromise whereby Pierce would pay her way to London, where she would stay with family while Guilford continued on to the Continent. Her parents had been visiting London at the time of the Miracle and she claimed she wanted to see the place where they had died.

Of course you weren’t supposed to say that people had died in the Miracle: they were “taken” or they “passed over,” as if they’d been translated to glory between one breath and the next. And, Guilford thought, who knows? Maybe it really had happened that way. But, in fact, several million people had simply vanished from the face of the earth, along with their farms and cities and flora and fauna, and Caroline could not be forgiving of the Miracle; her view of it was violent and harsh.

It made him feel peculiar to be the only man aboard Odense with a woman and child in tow, but no one had made a hostile remark, and Lily had won over a few hearts. So he allowed himself to feel lucky.

After dinner the crowd broke up: the ship’s surgeon off to keep company with a flask of Canadian rye, the scientists to play cards over tattered felt tables in the smoking room, Guilford back to his cabin to read Lily a chapter from a good American fairy tale, The Land of Oz. The Oz books were everywhere since Brothers Grimm and Andersen fell out of favor, carrying as they did the taint of Old Europe. Lily, bless her, didn’t know books had politics. She just loved Dorothy. Guilford had grown rather fond of the Kansas girl himself.

At last Lily put her head back and closed her eyes. Watching her sleep, Guilford felt a pang of disorientation. It was odd, how life mixed things up. How had he come to be aboard a steamship bound for Europe? Maybe he hadn’t done the wise thing after all.

But of course there was no going back.

He squared the blanket over Lily’s cot, turned off the light and joined Caroline in bed. Caroline lay asleep with her back to him, a pure arc of human warmth. He curled against her and let the grumbling of the engines lull him to sleep.

He woke shortly after sunrise, restless; dressed and slipped out of the cabin without waking his wife or daughter.

The air on deck was raw, the morning sky blue as porcelain. Only a few high scrawls of cloud marked the eastern horizon. Guilford leaned into the wind, thinking of nothing in particular, until a young officer joined him at the rail. The sailor didn’t offer name or rank, only a smile, the accidental camaraderie of two men awake in the bitter dawn.

They stared into the sky. After a time the sailor turned his head and said, “We’re getting closer. You can smell it on the wind.”

Guilford frowned at the prospect of another tall tale. “Smell what?”

The sailor was an American; his accent was slow Mississippi. “Little like cinnamon. Little like wintergreen. Little like something you never smelled before. Like some dusty old spice from a place no white man’s ever been. You can smell it better if you close your eyes.”

Guilford closed his eyes. He was conscious of the chill of the air as it ran through his nostrils. It would be a small miracle if he could smell anything at all in this wind. And yet…

Cloves, he wondered? Cardamom? Incense?

“What is it?”

“The new world, friend. Every tree, every river, every mountain, every valley. The whole continent, crossing the ocean on a wind. Smell it?”

Guilford believed he did.

Chapter Two

Eleanor Sanders-Moss was everything Elias Vale had expected: a buxom Southern aristocrat past her prime, spine stiff, chin high, rain streaming from a silk umbrella, dignity colonizing the ruins of youth. She left a hansom standing at the curb: apparently the renaissance of the automobile had passed Mrs. Sanders-Moss by. The years had not. She suffered from crow’s feet and doubt. The wrinkles were past hiding; the doubt she was transparently working to conceal.

She said, “Elias Vale?”

He smiled, matching her reserve, dueling for advantage. Every pause a weapon. He was good at this. “Mrs. Sanders-Moss,” he said. “Please, come in.”

She stepped inside the doorway, folded her umbrella and dropped it without ceremony into the elephant’s-foot holder. She blinked as he closed the door. Vale preferred to keep the lights turned low. On gloomy days like this the eye was slow to adjust. It was a hazard to navigation, but atmosphere was paramount: he dealt, after all, in the commerce of the invisible.

And the atmosphere was working its effect on Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Vale tried to imagine the scene from her perspective, the faded splendor of this rented town house on the wrong side of the Potomac. Side-boards furnished with Victorian bronzes. Greek wrestlers, Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf. Japanese prints obscured by shadows. And Vale himself, prematurely white-haired (an asset, really), stout, his coat trimmed in velvet, homely face redeemed by fierce and focused eyes. Green eyes. He had been born lucky: the hair and eyes made him plausible, he often thought.

He spun out silence into the room. Mrs. Sanders-Moss fidgeted and said at last, “We have an appointment… ?”

“Of course.”

“Mrs. Fowler recommended—”

“I know. Please come into my study.”

He smiled again. What they wanted, these women, was someone outré, unworldly… a monster, but their monster, a monster domesticated but not quite tame. He took Mrs. Sanders-Moss past velvet curtains into a smaller room lined with books. The books were old, ponderous, impressive unless you troubled to decipher the faded gilt on their threadbare spines: collections of nineteenth-century sermons, which Vale had bought for pennies at a farm auction. The arcanum, people assumed.

He steered Mrs. Sanders-Moss into a chair, then sat opposite her across a burnished tabletop. She mustn’t know that he was nervous, too. Mrs. Sanders-Moss was no ordinary client. She was the prey he had been stalking for more than a year now. She was well-connected. She hosted a monthly salon at her Virginia estate which was attended by many of the city’s intellectual lights — and their wives.

He wanted very much to impress Mrs. Sanders-Moss.

She folded her hands in her lap and fixed him with an earnest gaze. “Mrs. Fowler recommended you quite highly, Mr. Vale.”

“Doctor,” he corrected.

“Dr. Vale.” She was still wary. “I’m not a gullible woman. I don’t consult spiritualists, as a rule. But Mrs. Fowler was very impressed by your readings.”

“I don’t read, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. There are no tea leaves here. I won’t look at your palm. No crystal ball. No tarot cards.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not offended.”

“Well, she spoke very highly of you. Mrs. Fowler, I mean.”

“I recall the lady.”

“What you told her about her husband—”

“I’m happy she was pleased. Now. Why are you here?”

She put her hands in her lap. Restraining, perhaps, the urge to run.

“I’ve lost something,” she whispered.

He waited.

“A lock of hair…”

“Whose hair?”

Dignity fled. Now the confession. “My daughter’s. My first daughter. Emily. She died at two years. Diphtheria, you see. She was a perfect little girl. When she was ill I took a lock of her hair and kept it with a few of her things. A rattle, a christening dress…”

“All missing?”

“Yes! But it’s the hair that seems… the most terrible loss. It’s all I have of her, really.”

“And you want my help finding these items?”

“If it’s not too trivial.”

He softened his voice. “It’s not trivial at all.”

She looked at him with a gush of relief: she had made herself vulnerable and he had done nothing to hurt her; he had understood. That was what it was all about, Vale thought, this roundelay of shame and redemption. He wondered if doctors who treated venereal diseases felt the same way.

“Can you help me?”

“In all honesty, I don’t know. I can try. But you have to help me. Will you take my hand?”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss reached tentatively across the table. Her hand was small and cool and he folded it into his own larger, firmer grip.

Their eyes met.

“Try not to be startled by anything you might see or hear.”

“Speaking trumpets? That sort of thing?”

“Nothing as vulgar. This isn’t a tent show.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind. Also, remember you may have to be patient. Often it takes time, contacting the other world.”

“I have nowhere to go, Mr. Vale.”

So the preliminaries were over and all that remained was to focus his concentration and wait for the god to rise from his inner depths — from what the Hindu mystics called “the lower chakras.” He didn’t relish it. It was always a painful, humiliating experience.

There was a price to be paid for everything, Vale thought.

The god: only he could hear it speak (unless he lent it his own, merely corporeal tongue); and when it spoke, he could hear nothing else. He had heard it for the first time in August of 1914.

Before the Miracle he had made a marginal living with a traveling show. Vale and two partners had trawled the hinterlands with a mummified body they purchased through the back door of a mortuary in Racine and billed as the corpse of John Wilkes Booth. The show played best in ditch towns where the circus never came, away from the rail lines, deep in cotton country, wheat country, Kentucky hemp country. Vale did all right, delivering the pitch and priming the crowds. He had a talent for talk. But it was a dying trade even before the Miracle, and the Miracle killed it. Rural income plummeted; the rare few with spending money wouldn’t part with their pennies just for a glimpse of an assassin’s leathery carcass. The Civil War was another generation’s apocalypse. This generation had its own. His partners abandoned Mr. Booth in an Iowa cornfield.

By the blistering August of that year Vale was on his own, peddling Bibles from a frayed sample case and traveling, often as not, by boxcar. Twice he was attacked by thieves. He had fought back: saved his Bibles but lost a supply of clean collars and partial vision in one eye, the green of the iris faintly and permanently clouded (but that played well, too).

He had walked a lot that day. A hot Ohio Valley day. The air was humid, the sky flat white, commerce listless. In the Olympia Diner (in some town, name forgotten, where the river coiled west like lazy smoke), the waitress claimed to hear thunder in the air. Vale spent his last money on a chicken-and-gravy sandwich and went off in search of a place to sleep.

Past sunset he found an empty brickworks at the edge of town. The air inside the enormous building was close and wet and stank of mildew and machine oil. Abandoned Furnaces loomed like scabrous idols in the darkness. He made a sort of bed high up in the scaffolding where he imagined he would be safe, sleeping on a stained mattress he dragged in from a hillside dump. But sleep didn’t come easily. A night wind guttered through the empty flames of the factory windows, but the air remained close and hot. Rain began falling, deep in the night. He listened to it trickle down a thousand crevices to pool on the muddy floor. Erosion, he thought, pricking at iron and stone.

The voice — not yet a voice but a premonitory, echoing thunder — came to him without warning, well past midnight.

It pinned him flat. Literally, he could not move. It was as if he was held in place by a tremendous weight, but the weight was electric, pulsing through him, sparking from his fingertips. He wondered if he had been struck by lightning. He thought he was about to die.

Then the voice spoke, and it spoke not words but, somehow, meanings; the equivalent words, when he attempted to frame them, were a lifeless approximation. It knows my name, Vale thought. No, not my name, my secret idea of myself.

The electricity forced open his eyelids. Unwilling and afraid, he saw the god standing above him. The god was monstrous. It was ugly, ancient, its beetle-like body a translucent green, rain falling right through it. The god reeked, an obscure smell that reminded Vale of paint thinner and creosote.

How could he sum up what he learned that night? It was ineffable, unspeakable; he could hardly bring himself to sully it with language.

Yet, forced, he might say:

I learned that I have a purpose in life.

I learned that I have a destiny.

I learned that I have been chosen.

I learned that the gods are several and that they know my name.

I learned that there is a world under the world.

I learned that I have friends among the powerful.

I learned that I need to be patient.

I learned that I will be rewarded for my patience.

And I learned — this above all — that I might not need to die.

“You have a servant,” Vale said. “A Negress.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss sat erect, eyes wide, like a schoolgirl called on by an intimidating teacher. “Yes. Olivia… her name is Olivia.”

He wasn’t conscious of speaking. He had given himself over to another presence. He felt the rubbery peristalsis of his lips and tongue as something foreign and revolting, as if a slug had crawled into his mouth.

“She’s been with you a long time — this Olivia.”

“Yes; a very long time.”

“She was with you when your daughter was born.”

“Yes.”

“And she cared for the girl.”

“Yes.”

“Wept when the girl died.”

“We all did. The household.”

“But Olivia harbored deeper feelings.”

“Did she?”

“She knows about the box. The lock of hair, the christening dress.”

“I suppose she must. But—”

“You kept them under the bed.”

“Yes!”

“Olivia dusts under the bed. She knows when you’ve looked at the box. She knows because the dust is disturbed. She pays attention to dust.”

“That’s possible, but—”

“You haven’t opened the box for a long time. More than a year.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss lowered her eyes. “But I’ve thought of it. I didn’t forget.”

“Olivia treats the box as a shrine. She worships it. She opens it when you’re out of the house. She’s careful not to disturb the dust. She thinks of it as her own.”

“Olivia…”

“She thinks you don’t do justice to the memory of your daughter.”

“That’s not true!”

“But it’s what she believes.”

“Olivia took the box?”

“Not a theft, by her lights.”

“Please — Dr. Vale — where is it? Is it safe?”

“Quite safe.”

“Where?”

“In the maid’s quarters, at the back of a closet.” (For a moment Vale saw it in his mind’s eye, the wooden box like a tiny coffin swathed in ancient linens; he smelled camphor and dust and cloistered grief.)

“I trusted her!”

“She loved the girl, too, Mrs. Sanders-Moss. Very much.” Vale took a deep, shuddering breath; began to reclaim himself, felt the god leaving him, subsiding into the hidden world again. The relief was exquisite. “Take back what belongs to you. But please, don’t be too hard on Olivia.”

Mrs. Sanders-Moss looked at him with a very gratifying expression of awe.

She thanked him effusively. He turned down the offer of money. Both her tentative smile and her shaken demeanor were encouraging, very promising indeed. But, of course, only time would tell.

When she had taken her umbrella and gone he opened a bottle of brandy and retreated to an upstairs room where the rain rattled down a frosted window, the gaslights were turned high, and the only book in sight was a tattered pulp-paper volume entitled His Mistress’s Petticoat.

To outward appearance, the change worked in him by the manifestation of the god was subtle. Inwardly, he felt exhausted, almost wounded. There was a rawness, not quite pain, which extended to every limb. His eyes burned. The liquor helped, but it would be another day until he was completely himself.

With luck the brandy would moderate the dreams that followed a manifestation. In the dreams he found himself inevitably in some cold wilderness, some borderless vast gray desert, and when out of a misplaced curiosity or simply mischief he lifted up a random stone he uncovered a hole from which poured countless insects of some unknown and hideous kind, many-legged, pincered, venomous, swarming up his arm and invading his skull.

He wasn’t a religious man. He had never believed in spirits, table-rapping, astrology, or the Resurrected Christ. He wasn’t sure he believed in any of those things now; the sum of his belief resided in this single god, the one that had touched him with such awful, irresistible intimacy.

He had the skills of a confidence man and he was certainly not averse to a profitable larceny, but there had been no collusion in the case of, for instance, Mrs. Sanders-Moss; she was a mystery to him, and so was the servant girl Olivia and the memento mori in the shoe box. His own prophecies took him by surprise. The words, not his own, had fallen from his lips like ripe fruit from a tree.

The words served him well enough, mind you. But they served another purpose, too.

Larceny, by comparison, would have been infinitely more simple.

But he took another glass of brandy and consoled himself: You don’t come to immortality by the low road.

A week passed. Nothing. He began to worry.

Then a note in the afternoon mail:

Dr. Vale,

The treasures have been recovered. You have my most boundless gratitude.

I am entertaining guests this coming Thursday at six o’clock for dinner and conversation. If you happen to be free to attend, you would be most welcome.

RSVP

Mrs. Edward Sanders-Moss

She had signed it, Eleanor.

Chapter Three

Odense docked at the makeshift harbor in the marshy estuary of the Thames, a maze of colliers, oilers, heighters and sailing ships gathered in from the outposts of the Empire. Guilford Law, plus family, plus the body of the Finch expedition and all its compasses, alidades, dried food, and paraphernalia, transferred to a ferry bound up the Thames to London. Guilford personally supervised the loading of his photographic equipment — the carefully crated 8''x10'' glass plates, the camera, lenses, and tripod.

The ferry was a cold and noisy steamer but blessed with generous windows. Caroline comforted Lily, who disliked the hard wooden benches, while Guilford gave himself up to the scrolling shoreline.

It was his first real view of the new world. The Thames mouth and London were the single most populous territory of the continent: most known, most seen, often photographed, but still wild — smug, Guilford thought, with wildness. The distant shore was dense with alien growth, hollow flute trees and reed grasses obscure in the gathering shadows of a chill afternoon. The strangeness of it burned in Guilford like a coal. After all he had read and dreamed, here was the tangible and impossible fact itself, not an illustration in a book but a living mosaic of light and shade and wind. The river ran green with false lotus, colonies of domed pads drifting in the water: a hazard to navigation, he’d been told, especially in summer, when the blooms came down from the Cotswolds in dense congregations and choked the screws of the steamships. He caught a glimpse of John Sullivan on the glass-walled promenade deck. Sullivan had been to Europe in 1918, had made collections at the mouth of the Rhine, but that experience obviously hadn’t jaded him; there was an intensity of observation in the botanist’s eyes that made conversation unthinkable.

Soon enough there was human litter along the shore, rough cabins, an abandoned farm, a smoldering garbage pit; and then the outskirts of the Port of London itself, and even Caroline took an interest.

The city was a random collation on the north bank of the river. It had been carved into the wilderness by soldiers and loyalist volunteers recalled by Lord Kitchener from the colonies, and it was hardly the London of Christopher Wren: it looked to Guilford like any smoky frontier town, a congregation of sawmills, hotels, docks, and warehouses. He identified the silhouette of the city’s single famous monument, a column of South African marble cut to commemorate the losses of 1912. The Miracle had not been kind to human beings. It had replaced rocks with rocks, plants with stranger plants, animals with vaguely equivalent creatures — but of the vanished human population or any sentient species, no trace had ever been found.

Taller than the memorial pillar were the great iron cranes dredging and improving the port facilities. Beyond these, most striking of all, was the skeletal framework of the new St. Paul’s Cathedral, astride what must be Ludgate Hill. No bridges crossed the Thames, though there were plans to build one; a variety of ferries accommodated the traffic.

He felt Lily tug his sleeve. “Daddy,” she said solemnly. “A monster.”

“What’s that, Lil?”

“A monster! Look.”

His wide-eyed daughter pointed off the port bow, upriver.

Guilford told Lily the name of the monster even as his heart began to beat faster: a silt snake, the settlers called it, or sometimes river snake. Caroline took his other arm tightly as the chatter of voices ceased. The silt snake lifted its head above the ship’s prow in a motion startlingly gentle, given that its skull was a blunt wedge the size of a child’s coffin attached to a twenty-foot neck. The creature was harmless, Guilford knew — placid, literally a lotus-eater — but it was frighteningly large.

Below the waterline the creature would have anchored itself in the mud. The silt snake’s legs were boneless cartilaginous spurs that served to brace it against river currents. Its skin was an oily white, mottled in places with algal green. The creature appeared fascinated by the human activity ashore. It aimed its apposite eyes in turn at the harbor cranes, blinked, and opened its mouth soundlessly. Then it spotted a mass of floating lotus pads and scooped them from the water in one deft bobbing motion before submerging again into the Thames.

Caroline buried her head against Guilford’s shoulder. “God help us,” she whispered. “We’ve arrived in Hell.”

Lily demanded to know if that was true. Guilford assured her that it wasn’t; this was only London, new London in the new world — though it was an easy mistake to make, perhaps, with the gaudy sunset, the clanking harbor, the river monster and all.

Stevedores undertook the unloading of the ferry. Finch, Sullivan, and the rest of the expedition put up at the Imperial, London’s biggest hotel. Guilford looked wistfully at the leaded windows and wrought-iron balconies of the building as he rode with Caroline and Lily away from the harbor. They had hired a London taxi, essentially a horsecart with a cloth roof and a feeble suspension; they were bound for the home of Caroline’s uncle, Jered Pierce. Their luggage would follow in the morning.

A lamplighter moved through the dusky streets among boisterous crowds. There was not much left of the fabled English decorum, Guilford thought, if this mob of sailors and loud women was any sample. London was plainly a frontier town, its population culled from the rougher elements of the Royal Fleet. There might be shortages of coal and oil, but the grog shops appeared to be doing a roaring business.

Lily put her head on Guilford’s lap and closed her eyes. Caroline was awake and vigilant. She reached for Guilford’s hand and squeezed it. “Liam says they’re good people, but I’ve never met them,” meaning her aunt and uncle.

“They’re family, Caroline. I’m sure they’re fine.”

The Pierce shop stood on a brightly lit market street, but like everything else in the city it gave the impression of makeshift and ramshackle. Caroline’s uncle Jered bounded from the doorway and welcomed his niece with a hug, pumped Guilford’s hand vigorously, picked up Lily and examined her as if she were an especially satisfactory sack of flour. Then he ushered them in from the street, up a flight of iron stairs to the rooms where the Family lived above the shop. The flat was narrow and sparsely furnished, but a woodstove made it warm and Jered’s wife Alice welcomed them with another round of embraces. Guilford smiled and let Caroline do most of the talking. Landbound at last, he felt weary. Jered put a hollow log on the fire, and Guilford registered that even the smell of burning wood was different in Darwinia: the smoke was sweet and pungent, like Indian hemp or attar of roses.

The Pierce family had been widely scattered when the Miracle struck. Caroline had been in Boston with Jered’s brother Liam; both her parents had been in England with Caroline’s dying grandfather. Jered and Alice were in Capetown, had stayed there until the troubles of 1916; in August of that year they had sailed for London with a generous loan from Liam and plans for a dry goods and hardware business. Both were hardy types, thick-bodied and strong. Guilford liked them at once.

Lily went to bed first, in a spare room barely large enough to qualify as a closet, and Guilford and Caroline down the hallway. Their bed was a brass four-poster, immensely comfortable. The Pierce family had a more generous idea of how a mattress ought to be made than the pennypinching outfitters of the Odense. It was almost certainly the last civilized bed he would sleep in for a while, and Guilford meant to relish it; but he was unconscious as soon as he closed his eyes, and then, too soon, it was morning.

The Finch expedition waited in London for a second shipment of supplies, including five Stone-Galloway flat-bottom boats, eighteen-footers with outboard motors, due to arrive on the next vessel from New York. Guilford spent two days in a dim customs-house conducting an inventory while Preston Finch replaced various missing or damaged items — a block and tackle, a tarpaulin, a leaf press.

After that Guilford was free to spend time with his family. He lent a hand in the shop, watched Lily work her way through egg breakfasts, sausage suppers, and far too many sugar biscuits. He admired Jered’s Empire Volunteer Certificate, signed by Lord Kitchener himself, which held place of honor on the parlor wall. Every returned Englishman had one, but Jered took his Volunteer duties seriously and spoke without irony of rebuilding the Dominion.

This was all interesting but it was not the Europe Guilford longed to experience — the raw new world unmediated by human intervention. He told Jered he’d like to spend a day exploring the city.

“Not much to see, I’m afraid. Candlewick to St. Paul’s is a nice walk on a sunny day, or Thames Street beyond the wharves. Up east the roads are more mud than anything else. And stay away from the clearances.”

“I don’t mind mud,” Guilford said. “I expect I’ll see a lot of it in the next few months.”

Jered frowned uneasily. “I expect you’re right about that.”

Guilford walked past the market stalls and away from the clanging harbor. The morning sun was radiant, the air blissfully cool. He encountered much horse and cart traffic but few automobiles, and the city’s civil engineering was still a work in progress. Open sewers ran through the newer neighborhoods; a reeking honeywagon rattled down Candlewick Street, drawn by two swaybacked nags. Some of the townfolk wore white handkerchiefs tied over mouth and nose, for reasons which had been obvious to Guilford since the ferry docked: the smell of the city was at times appalling, a mixture of human and animal waste, coal smoke and the stench of the pulp mill across the river.

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.

Chapter Four

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.

The congressman’s daughter disagreed. “It’s Europe proper they should be afraid of.” She frowned becomingly. “You know what they say. Everything that lives there is ugly, and most of it is deadly.”

“Not as deadly as human beings.” The young functionary, on the other hand, wanted to appear cynical. Probably he imagined it made him seem older.

“Don’t be scandalous, Richard.”

“And seldom as ugly.”

“They’re brave.”

“Brave enough, but in their place I’d worry more about the Partisans. Or even the English.”

“It hasn’t come to that.”

“Not yet. But the English are no friends of ours. Kitchener is provisioning the Partisans, you know.”

“That’s a rumor, and you shouldn’t repeat it.”

“They’re endangering our European policy.”

“We were talking about the Finch expedition, not the English.”

“Preston Finch can run a river, certainly, but I predict they’ll take more casualties from bullets than from rapids. Or monsters.”

“Don’t say monsters, Richard.”

“Chastisements of God.”

“Just the thought of it makes me shiver. Partisans are only people, after all.”

“Dear girl. But I suppose Dr. Vale would be out of business if women weren’t inclined to the romantic point of view. Isn’t that so?”

Vale performed his best and most unctuous smile. “Women are better able to see the infinite. Or less afraid of it.”

“There!” The congressman’s daughter blushed happily. “The infinite, Richard.”

Vale wished he could show her the infinite. It would burn her pretty eyes to cinders, he thought. It would peel the flesh from her skull.

After dinner the men retired to the library with brandies and Vale was left with the women. There was considerable talk of nephews in the military and their lapses of communication, of husbands keeping late hours at the State Department. Vale felt a certain resonance in these omens but couldn’t fathom their final significance. War? War with England? War with Japan? Neither seemed plausible… but Washington since Wilson’s death was a mossbound well, dark and easily poisoned.

Pressed for wisdom, Vale confined himself to drawing-room prophecies. Lost cats and errant children; the terrors of yellow fever, polio, influenza. His visions were benign and hardly supernatural. Private questions could be handled at his business address, and, in fact, his clientele had increased considerably in the two months since his first encounter with Eleanor. He was well on his way to becoming Father Confessor to a generation of aging heiresses. He kept careful notes.

The evening dragged on and showed no signs of becoming especially productive: not much to feed his diary tonight, Vale thought. Still, this was where he needed to be. Not just to bolster his income, though that was certainly a welcome side effect. He was following a deeper instinct, perhaps not quite his own. His god wanted him here.

And one does what a god wants, because that is the nature of a god, Vale thought: to be obeyed. That above all.

As he was leaving, Eleanor steered a clearly quite drunken man toward him. “Dr. Vale? This is Professor Randall, you were introduced, weren’t you?”

Vale shook hands with the white-haired venerable. Among Eleanor’s collection of academics and civil-service nonentities, which one was this? Randall, ah, something at the Natural History Museum, a curator of… could it be paleontology? That orphaned science.

“See him to his automobile,” Eleanor said, “won’t you? Eugene, go with Dr. Vale. A walk around the grounds might clear your head.”

The night air smelled of blossoms and dew, at least when the professor was downwind. Vale looked at his companion more carefully, imagined he saw pale structures under the surface of Randall’s body. Coral growths of age (parchment skin, arthritic knuckles) obscured the buried soul. If paleontologists possessed souls.

“Finch is mad,” Randall muttered, continuing some abandoned conversation, “if he thinks… if he thinks he can prove…”

“There’s nothing to prove tonight, sir.”

Randall shook his head and squinted at Vale, seeing him perhaps for the first time. “You. Ah. You’re the fortune-teller, yes?”

“In a way.”

“See the future, do you?”

“Through a glass,” Vale said. “Darkly.”

“The future of the world?”

“More or less.”

“We talk about Europe,” Randall said. “Europe, the Sodom so corrupt it was cast into the refiner’s fire. And so we pluck out the seeds of Europeanism wherever we find them, whatever that means. Gross hypocrisy, of course. A political fad. Do you want to see Europe?” He swept his hand at the white-columned Sanders-Moss estate. “Here it is! The court at Versailles. It might as well be.”

The stars were vivid in the spring sky. Lately Vale had begun to perceive a kind of depth in starry skies, a layering or recession that made him think of forests and meadows, of tangled thickets in which predatory animals lurked. As above, so below.

“This Creator men like Finch drone on about,” Randall said. “One wants to believe, of course. But there are no fingerprints on a fossil. Washed off, I suppose, in the Flood.”

Obviously Randall shouldn’t be saying any of this. The climate of opinion had shifted since the Miracle and men like Randall were themselves a kind of living fossil — wooly mammoths trapped in an ice age. Of course Randall, a collector of bones, could hardly know that Vale was a collector of indiscretions.

Who would pay to know what Randall thought of Preston Finch? And in what currency, and when?

“I’m sorry,” Randall said. “This could hardly interest you.”

“On the contrary,” Vale said, walking with his prey into the dewy night. “It interests me a great deal.”

Chapter Five

The flat-bottom riverboats arrived from New York and were transferred to a cross-channel steamer, the Argus. Guilford, Finch, Sullivan, and the surveyor, Chuck Hemphill, supervised the loading and annoyed the vessel’s cargo master until they were banished to the tarry dock. Spring sunlight washed the wharfs and softened the tarry planks; clots of false lotus rotted against the pilings; gulls wheeled overhead. The gulls had been among the first terrestrial immigrants to Darwinia, followed in turn by human beings, wheat, barley, potatoes; wildflowers (loosestrife, bindweed); rats, cattle, sheep, lice, fleas, cockroaches — all the biological stew of the coastal settlements.

Preston Finch stood on the wharf with his huge hands clamped behind his back, face shadowed by his solar topee. Finch was a paradox, Guilford thought: a hardy man, powerful despite his age, a weathered river-runner whose judgment and courage were unquestionable. But his Noachian geology, fashionable though it might have become in the nervous aftermath of the Miracle, seemed to Guilford a stew of half-truths, dubious reasoning, and wistful Protestantism. Implausible no matter how he dressed up the matter with theories of sedimentation and quotations from Berkeley. Moreover, Finch refused to discuss these ideas and didn’t brook criticism from his colleagues, much less from a mere photographer. What must it be like, Guilford wondered, to have such a baroque architecture crammed inside one’s skull? Such a strange cathedral, so well buttressed, so well defended?

John Sullivan, the expedition’s other gray eminence, leaned against a wharfhouse wall, arms crossed, smiling faintly under a broad straw hat. Two aging men, Finch and Sullivan, but Sullivan smiled — that was the difference.

The last of the crates descended into the Argus’s hold. Finch signed a manifest for the sweating cargo master. There was an air of finality about the act. The Argus would sail in the morning.

Sullivan touched Guilford’s shoulder. “Do you have a few free minutes, Mr. Law? There’s something you might like to see.”

Museum of Monstrosities, announced the shingle above the door.

The building was hardly more than a shack, but it was an old building, as buildings went in London, perhaps one of the first permanent structures erected along the marshy banks of the Thames. It looked to Guilford as if it had been used and abandoned many times over.

“Here?” Guilford asked. They had come a short walk from the wharfs, behind the brick barrelhouses, where the air was gloomy and stagnant.

“Tuppence to see the monsters,” Sullivan said. His drawl was unreconstructed Arkansas, but on his lips it sounded like Oxford. Or at least what Guilford imagined an Oxford accent might have been like. “The proprietor’s a drunk. But he does have one interesting item.”

The “proprietor,” a sullen man who reeked of gin, opened the door at Sullivan’s knock, took Sullivan’s money into his grimy hand, and vanished wordlessly behind a canvas curtain, leaving his guests to peer at the taxidermical trophies arrayed on crude shelves around the narrow front room. The smaller exhibits were legitimate, in the sense that they were recognizable Darwinian animals badly stuffed and mounted: a buttonhook bird, a miscellany of six-legged scavengers, a leopard snake with its hinged jaws open. Sullivan raised a window blind, but the extra light was no boon, in Guilford’s opinion. Glass eyes glittered and peered in odd directions.

“This,” Sullivan said.

He meant the upright skeleton languishing in a corner. Guilford approached it skeptically. At first glance it looked like the skeleton of a bear — crudely bipedal, a cage of ribs attached to a ventral spine, the fearsome skull long and multiply jointed, teeth like flint knives. Frightening. “But it’s a fake,” Guilford said.

“How do you arrive at that conclusion, Mr. Law?”

Surely Sullivan could see for himself? “It’s all string and baling wire. Some of the bones are fresher than others. That looks like a cow’s femur, there — the joints don’t begin to match.”

“Very good. The photographer’s eye.”

“It doesn’t take a photographer.”

“You’re right, of course. The anatomy is a joke. But what interests me is the rib cage, which is correctly articulated, and in particular the skull.”

Guilford looked again. The ribs and ventral spine were clearly Darwinian; it was the standard back-to-front arrangement, the spine U-shaped, with a deep chordal notch. The skull itself was long, faintly bovine, the dome high and capacious: a cunning carnivore. “You think those are authentic?”

“Authentic in the sense that they’re genuine bones, not papier-mâché, and obviously not mammalian. Our host claims he bought them from a settler who dug them out of a bog somewhere up the Lea, looking for something cheaper than coal to burn.”

“Then they’re relatively recent.”

“Relatively, though no one’s seen a living animal like it or anything remotely equivalent. Large predators are scarce on the Continent. Donnegan reported a leopard-sized carnivore from the Massif Central, but nothing bigger. So what does this fellow represent, Mr. Law? That’s the interesting question. A large, recently-extinct hunter?”

“I hope extinct. He looks formidable.”

“Formidable and, judging by the cranium, perhaps intelligent. As animals go. If there are any of his tribe still living, we may need those pistols Finch is so fond of. And if not—”

“If not?”

“Well, what does it mean to talk about an extinct species, when the continent is only eight years old?”

Guilford decided to tread carefully. “You’re assuming the continent has a history.”

“I’m not assuming it, I’m deducing it. Oh, it’s a familiar argument — I simply wondered where you stood.”

“The trouble is, we have two histories. One continent, two histories. I don’t know how to reconcile them.”

Sullivan smiled. “That’s a good first pass. Forced to guess, Mr. Law? Which is it? Elizabeth the First, or our bony friend here?”

“I’ve thought about it, obviously, but—”

“Don’t hedge. Take your pick.”

“Both,” Guilford said flatly. “Somehow… both.”

“But isn’t that impossible?”

“Apparently not.”

Sullivan’s smile became a grin. “Good for you.”

So Guilford had passed a test, though the older man’s motives remained obscure. That was all right. Guilford liked Sullivan, was pleased that the botanist had chosen to treat him as an equal. Mainly, however, he was glad to step out of the taxidermist’s hut and into the daylight. Though London’s docklands didn’t smell much better.

That night he shared his bed with Caroline for the last time.

Last time until autumn, Guilford corrected himself, but there was small comfort in the thought. Frustratingly, she was cool toward him tonight.

She was the only woman he had ever slept with. He had met her in the offices of Atticus and Pierce when he was touching up his plates for Rocky Mountain Fossil Shales. Guilford had felt an immediate, instinctive fondness for the aloof and frowning Pierce girl. He obtained a brief introduction from her uncle and in the following weeks began to calculate her appearances at the office: she took lunch with her uncle, a secretary told him, every Wednesday noon. Guilford intercepted her after one of these meetings and offered to walk her to the streetcar. She had accepted, looking at him from under her crown of hair like a wary princess.

Wary and wounded. Caroline hadn’t recovered from the loss of her parents in the Miracle, but that was a common enough grief. Guilford found he could provoke a smile from her, at least now and then. In those days her silences had been more ally than enemy; they fostered a subtler communication. In that invisible language she had said something like: I’m hurt but too proud to admit it — can you help? And he had answered, I’ll make you a safe place. I’ll make you a home.

Now he lay awake with the sound of an occasional horsecart passing in the night and a valley of cotton bedsheet between himself and the woman he loved. Was it possible to break an unspoken promise? The truth was that he hadn’t delivered Caroline to a safe place after all. He had traveled too far and too often: out west, and now here. Given her a fine daughter but brought them to this foreign shore, where he was about to abandon them… in the name of history, or science, or his own reckless dreams.

He told himself that this was what men did, that men had been doing it for centuries and that if men didn’t do it the race would still be living in trees. But the truth was more complex, involved matters Guilford himself didn’t care to think about, perhaps contained some echo of his father, whose stolid pragmatism had been the path to an early grave.

Caroline was asleep now, or nearly asleep. He put a hand on the slope of her hip, a gentle pressure that was meant to say But I’ll come back. She responded with a sleepy curl, almost a shrug, not quite indifferent. Perhaps.

In the morning they were strangers to one another.

Caroline and Lily rode with him to the docks, where the Argus was restless with the tide. Cool mists twined around the ship’s rust-pocked hull.

Guilford hugged Caroline, feeling wordless and crude; then Lily clambered up into his arms, pressed her soft cheek against his and said, “Come back soon.”

Guilford promised he would.

Lily, at least, believed him.

Then he walked up the gangway, turned at the rail to wave goodbye, but his wife and daughter were already lost among the crowd that thronged the wharf. As quick as that, Guilford thought. As quick as that.

Argus made her passage across the Channel in a fog. Guilford brooded belowdecks until the sun broke through and John Sullivan demanded that he come up to see the continent by morning light.

What Guilford saw was a dense green wetland combed by a westerly wind — the saltwater marshes at the vast mouth of the Rhine. Stromatolites rose like unearthly monuments, and flute trees had colonized the delta everywhere the silt rose high enough to support their spidery roots. The steam packet followed a shallow but weed-free channel — slowly, because soundings were crude and the silt often shifted after a storm — toward a denser, greener distance. Jeffersonville was a faint plume of smoke on the flat green horizon, then a smudge, then a brown aggregation of shacks built into reed-stalk hummocks or perched on stilts where the ground was firm enough, and everywhere crude docks and small boats and the reek of salt, fish, refuse, and human waste. Caroline had thought London was primitive; Guilford was thankful she hadn’t seen Jeffersonville. The town was like a posted warning: here ends civilization. Beyond this point, the anarchy of Nature.

There were plenty of fishing boats, canoes, and what looked like rafts cobbled from Darwinian timber, all clotting the net-draped wharves, but only one other vessel as large as the Argus, an American gunship anchored and flying her colors. “That’s our ride upriver,” Sullivan said, standing alongside Guilford at the rail. “We won’t be here long. Finch will make obeisance to the Navy while we hire ourselves a pathfinder.”

“We?” Guilford asked.

“You and I. Then you can set up your lenses. Capture us all at the dock. Embarkation at Jeffersonville. Should make a stirring photograph.” Sullivan clapped him on the back. “Cheer up, Mr. Law. This is the real new world, and you’re about to set foot on it.”

But there was little firm footing here in the marshes. You kept to the boardwalks or risked being swallowed up. Guilford wondered how much of Darwinia would be like this — the blue sky, the combing wind, the quiet threat.

Sullivan notified Finch that he and Guilford were going to hire a guide. Guilford was lost as soon as the wharves were out of sight, hidden by fishermen’s shacks and a tall stand of mosque trees. But Sullivan seemed to know where he was going. He had been here in 1918, he said, cataloging some of the marshland species. “I know the town, though it’s bigger now, and I met a few of the old hands.”

The people they passed looked rough-hewn and dangerous. The government had begun handing out homestead grants and paid passage not long after the Miracle, but it took a certain kind of person to volunteer for frontier life, even in those difficult days. Not a few of them had been fugitives from the law.

They lived by fishing and trapping and their wits. Judging by the visible evidence, fresh water and soap were in short supply. Men and women alike wore rough clothing and had let their hair grow long and tangled. Despite which, several of these shabby individuals looked at Sullivan and Guilford with the amused contempt of a native for a tourist.

“We’re going to see a man named Tom Compton,” Sullivan said. “Best tracker in Jeffersonville, assuming he isn’t dead or out in the bush.”

Tom Compton lived in a wooden hut away from the water. Sullivan didn’t knock but barged through the half-open door — Darwinian manners, perhaps. Guilford followed cautiously. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness he found the hut sparse and clean-smelling, the plank floor dressed with a cotton rug, the walls hung with various kinds of fishing and hunting tackle. Tom Compton sat placidly in one corner of the single room, a large man with a vast, knotted beard. His skin was dark, his race obviously mixed. He wore a chain of claws around his neck. His shirt was woven of some coarse local fiber, but his trousers appeared to be conventional denim, half-hidden by high waterproof boots. He blinked at his visitors without enthusiasm and took a long-stemmed pipe from the table by his elbow.

“Bit early for that, isn’t it?” Sullivan asked.

Tom Compton struck a wooden match and applied it to the bowl of the pipe. “Not when I see you.”

“You know why I’m here, Tom?”

“I’ve heard rumors.”

“We’re traveling inland.”

“Doesn’t concern me.”

“I’d like you to come with us.”

“Can’t do it.”

“We’re crossing the Alps.”

“I’m not interested.” He passed the pipe to Sullivan, who took it and inhaled the smoke. Not tobacco, Guilford thought. Sullivan passed the pipe to him, and Guilford looked at it with dismay. Could he politely refuse, or was this something like a Cherokee summit meeting, a smoke instead of a handshake?

Tom Compton laughed. Sullivan said, “It’s the dried leaves of a river plant. Mildly intoxicating, but hardly opium.”

Guilford took the gnarly briar. The smoke tasted the way a root cellar smells. He lost most of it to a coughing fit.

“New hand,” Tom Compton said. “He doesn’t know the country.”

“He’ll learn.”

“They all learn,” the frontiersman said. “Everybody learns. If the country doesn’t kill ’em first.”

Tom Compton’s pipe smoke made Guilford feel lighter and simpler. Events slowed to a crawl or leaped forward without interval. By the time he found his bunk aboard the Argus he was able to remember only fragments of the day.

He remembered following Dr. Sullivan and Tom Compton to a wharfside tavern where brown beer was served in steins made from the boles of dried flute reeds. The steins were porous and would begin to leak if you let them sit too long. It encouraged a style of drinking not conducive to clarity of thought. There had been food, too, a Darwinian fish draped across the plate like a limp black stingray. It tasted of salt and mud; Guilford ate sparingly.

They argued about the expedition. The frontiersman was scornful, insisting the journey was only an excuse to show the flag and express American claims to the hinterland. “You said yourself, this man Finch is an idiot.”

“He’s a clergyman, not a scientist; he just doesn’t know the difference. But he’s no idiot. He rescued three men from the water at Cataract Canyon — carried a man with double pleurisy safely to Lee’s Ferry. That was ten years ago, but I’m sure he’d do the same tomorrow. He planned and provisioned this expedition and I would trust him with my life.”

“Follow him into the deep country, you are trusting him with your life.”

“So I am. I couldn’t ask for a better companion. I could ask for a better scientist — but even there, Finch has his uses. There’s a certain climate of opinion in Washington that frowns on science in general: we couldn’t predict and can’t explain the Miracle, and in certain people’s minds that’s the next thing to responsibility. Idols with feet of clay fare badly in the public budget. But we can hold up Finch to Congress as a sterling example of so-called reverential science, not a threat to home or pulpit. We go to the hinterland, we learn a few things — and frankly, the more we learn, the shakier Finch’s academic position becomes.”

“You’re being used. Like Donnegan. Sure, you collect a few samples. But the money people want to know how far the Partisans have come, whether there’s coal in the Ruhr valley or iron in Lorraine…”

“And if we reconnoiter the Partisans or spot some anthracite — does it matter? These things will happen whether we cross the Alps or not. At least this way we gain a little knowledge from the bargain.”

Tom Compton turned to Guilford. “Sullivan thinks this continent is a riddle he can solve. That’s a brave and stupid idea.”

Sullivan persisted. “You’ve been farther inland than most trappers, Tom.”

“Not as far as all that.”

“You know what to expect.”

“Go far enough, no one knows what to expect.”

“Still, you’ve had experience.”

“More than you.”

“Your skills would be invaluable.”

“I have better things to do.”

They drank in silence for a while. Another round of beer gave the conversation a philosophical bent. The frontiersman confronted Guilford, his weathered brown face ferocious as a bear’s muzzle. “Why are you here, Mr. Law?”

“I’m a photographer,” Guilford said. He wished he had his camera with him; he wanted to photograph Tom Compton. This sun-wrinkled, beard-engulfed wild animal.

“I know what you do,” the frontiersman said. “Why are you here?”

To further his career. To make a name for himself. To bring back images trapped in glass and silver, of river pools and mountain meadows no human eye had seen. “I don’t know,” he heard himself say. “Curiosity, I guess.”

Tom Compton squinted at Guilford as if he had confessed to leprosy. “People come here to get away from something, Mr. Law, or to hunt for something. To make a little money or maybe even, like Sullivan here, to learn something. But the I don’t knows — those are the dangerous ones.”

One other memory came to Guilford as he was lulled to sleep by the rocking of Argus on the rising tide: Sullivan and Tom Compton talking about the back country, the frontiersman full of warnings: the new continent’s rivers had cut their own beds, not always according to the old maps, the wildlife was dangerous, the forage so difficult that without provisions you might as well be crossing a desert. There were unnamed fevers, often fatal. And as for crossing the Alps: well, Tom said, some few trappers and hunters had thought of crossing by the old St. Gothard route; it wasn’t a new idea. But tales came back, ghost stories, rumors — plain nonsense, Sullivan said scornfully — and maybe so, but enough to make a sane man reconsider… which excludes you, Sullivan said, and Tom grinned hugely and said, you too, you old madman, leaving Guilford to wonder what unspoken agreement had been reached between the two men and what might be waiting for them in the deep interior of this huge and chartless land.

Chapter Six

England at last, Colin Watson thought: but it wasn’t really England at all, was it? The Canadian cargo vessel steamed up the broad estuary of the Thames, its prow cutting into tidal waters the color of green tea: tropical, at least this time of year. Like visiting Bombay or Bihar. Certainly not like coming home.

He thought of the cargo rocking in the holds below. Coal from South Africa, India, Australia, a precious commodity in this age of rebellion and the fraying Empire. Tools and dies from Canada. And hundreds of crated Lee-Enfield rifles from the factory in Alberta, all bound for Kitchener’s Folly, New London, making a safe place in the wilderness, for the day when an English king was restored to an English throne.

The rifles were Watson’s responsibility. As soon as the ship was moored at the primitive docks he ordered his men — a few Sikhs and grumbling Canadians — to cinch and lift the pallets, while he went ashore to sign manifests for the Port Authority. The heat was stifling, and this crude wooden town was not by any stretch of the imagination London. And yet to be here brought home the reality of the Conversion of Europe, which for Watson had been a faraway event, as strange and as inherently implausible as a fairy tale, except that so many had indisputably died.

Certainly this wasn’t the country he had sailed from a decade ago. He had graduated from public school without merit and taken training from the Officer Corps at Woolwich: exchanged one barracks for another, Latin declensions for artillery maneuvers. In his naïveté he had expected G.A. Henty, a dignified heroism, Ndebele rebels fleeing the point of his sword. He had arrived instead at a dusty barracks in Cairo overseeing a rabble of bored infantrymen, until that night when the sky lit up with coruscating fire and the quaking earth shook down the British Protectorate in Egypt, among so many other things. An aimless enough life, but there had been the consolations of friendship and strong drink or, more tenuously, of God and Country, until 1912 made it clear that God was a cipher and that if He existed at all He must surely have despised the English.

Britain’s remaining military power had been concentrated on shoring up her possessions in India and South Africa. Southern Rhodesia had fallen, Salisbury burning like an autumn bonfire; Egypt and Sudan were lost to the Moslem rebels. Watson had been rescued from the hostile ruins of Cairo and placed on a hideously crowded troop transport bound for Canada. He spent months in a relocation barracks in the tall-timber country of British Columbia, was transferred at last to a prairie town where Kitchener’s government-in-exile had established a small-arms factory.

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 you’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.

The Weston anchored in mid-river. Guilford, newly mended though still somewhat weak, went ashore to help Sullivan collect fingerwort and a dozen other meadow species. The voucher specimens were prepared between the frames of Sullivan’s plant-press, the dried flats layered into a box wrapped in oilcloth. Sullivan showed him a particularly vivid orange flower common along the sandy shore. “For all its structure, it might be cousin to an English poppy. But these flowers are male, Mr. Law. Insects disperse pollen by literally devouring the stamens. The female flower — here’s one: you see? — is hardly a flower at all in the conventional sense. More like a thread dipped in honey. One immense pistil, with a Ciliate structure to carry the male pollen to the gynoecium. Insects are often trapped on it, and pollen with them. The pattern is common in Darwinia, non-existent among terrestrial plants. The physical resemblance is real but coincidental. As if the same process of evolution had acted through different channels — like this river, which approximates the Rhine in general but not in the specific. It drains roughly the same highlands to roughly the same ocean, but its elbows and meanders are entirely unpredictable.”

And its whirlpools, Guilford thought, and its rapids, though the river had been gentle enough so far. Did the river of evolution pose similar hazards?

Sullivan, Gillvany, Finch and Robinson ruled the daylight hours — Digby, the expedition’s cook, called them “Plants and Ants, Stones and Bones.” Night belonged to Keck, Tuckinan and Burke, surveyors and navigators, with their sextants and stars and maps by lamplight. Guilford enjoyed asking Keck exactly where the expedition was, because his answers were inevitably strange and wonderful. “We’re entering the Cologne Embayment, Mr. Law, and we’d be seeing Düsseldorf before long, if the world hadn’t been turned on its head.”

Weston anchored in a broad, slow turn of the river T. Compton calls Cathedral Pool. Rhine flows from a gentle rift valley, mountainous Bergischland east of us, the Rhine Gorge somewhere ahead. Generously forested terrain: mosque trees (taller than English spp.), immense khaki-colored sage-pine, complex undergrowth. Fire perhaps a threat in dry weather. This was brown coal territory in the other Europe; Compton says wildcatters have been spotted here shallow mines already operating (marginally), and we have seen crude roads a little river traffic. Finch claims to find evidence of coking coal, says this area will be an iron and steel center someday, God willing, with pig iron from the Oolitic scarps of the Cotes de Moselle, esp. if U.S. keeps continent from being “fenced with borders.”

Sullivan says coal is more evidence of an ancient Darwinia, a stratigraphic sequence caused by the Tertiary uplift of the Rhine Plateau. Real question, he says, is whether Darwinian geology is identical to old European geology, changes due solely to different weathering and river meanders; or whether Darwinian geology is only approximately the same, different in its finer points — which may affect our survey of the Alps: an unexpected gorge at Mount Genevre or Brenner would send us chastened back to J’ville.

Weather fine, blue skies, the river current stronger now.

It couldn’t last, Guilford knew, this leisurely river cruise, with a well-stocked galley and long days with the camera and plant-press, graveled beaches free of troublesome insects or animals, nights as rich with stars as any Guilford had seen in Montana. The Weston moved farther up the rift valley of the Rhine and the gorge walls grew steeper, the scraps more dramatic, until it was easy for Guilford to imagine the old Europe here, the vanished castles (“Eberbach,” Keck would intone, “Marksburg, Sooneck, Kaiserpfalz…”), massed Teutonic warriors with spikes and tassles on their helmets.

But this was not Old Europe and the evidence was everywhere: thornfish fluttering in the shallows, the cinammon reek of sage-pine forests (neither sage nor pine but a tall tree that grew branches in a spiral terrace), the night cries of creatures yet unnamed. Human beings had been this way — Guilford saw the occasional passing raft, plus evidence of tow-ropes, trappers’ huts, woodsmoke, fish weirs — but only very recently.

And there was, he found, a kind of comfort in the emptiness of the country enfolded around him, his own terrible and wonderful anonymity in it, making footprints where no footprints had been and knowing that the land would soon erase them. The land demanded nothing, gave nothing more than itself.

But the easy days couldn’t last. The Rheinfelden was ahead. The Weston would have to turn back. And then, Guilford thought, we’ll see what it means, to be truly alone, in all this unknown world of rock and forest.

The Rheinfelden Cascade, or Rhine River Falls, head of navigation. This is as far as Tom Compton has been. Some trappers, he says, claim to have portaged as far as Lake Constance. But trappers are inclined to boast.

The falls are not spectacular by comparison to, say, Niagara, but they gate the river quite effectively. Mist hangs heavy, a great pale thunderhead above the sweating rocks forested hills. Water a fast green flow, sky darkening with rain clouds, every rock and crevice invaded by a moss-like plant with delicate white blooms.

Having observed photographed the cascade we retreat to a point of portage. Tom Compton knows of a local fur breeder who might be willing to sell us animals for pack.

Postscriptum to Caroline Lily: Miss you both greatly, feel as if I’m talking to you in these pages even though I am very far away — deep in the Lost (or New) Continent, strangeness on every horizon.

The fur breeder turned out to be a truculent German-American who called himself “Erasmus” and who had corralled for breeding, on a crude farm a distance from the river, an enormous herd of fur snakes.

Fur snakes, Sullivan explained, were the continent’s most exploitable resource, at least for now. Herbivorous herd animals, they were common in the upland meadows and probably throughout the eastern steppes; Donnegan had encountered them in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which suggested they were widely distributed. Guilford was fascinated and spent much of the remainder of the day at Erasmus’s kraal, despite the pervasive odor, which was one of the fur snakes’ less attractive points.

The animals resembled, Guilford thought, not so much snakes as grubs — bloated, pale “faces” with cow-like eyes, cylindrical bodies, six legs obscured under ropes of matted hair. As a resource they were a virtual Sears-Roebuck catalog: fur for clothing, hides for tanning, fat for tallow, and a bland but edible meat. Snake furs were the Rhine’s staple of commerce, and snake fur, Sullivan asserted, had even made an appearance in New York fashion circles. Guilford supposed the smell didn’t survive the shearing, or who would want such a coat, even in a New York winter?

More important, the fur snakes made workable pack animals, without which the survey of the Alps would be a great deal more difficult. Preston Finch had already retired to Erasmus’ hut to negotiate for the purchase of fifteen or twenty of the animals. And Erasmus must drive a hard bargain, since by the time Diggs had his mess tent set up Finch and Erasmus were still bargaining — raised voices were audible.

At last Finch stormed out of the sod hut, ignoring dinner. “Horrible man,” he muttered. “Partisan sympathizer. This is hopeless.”

The Navy pilot and crew remained aboard the Weston, preparing to sail back down the Rhine with specimens, collections, field notes, letters home. Guilford sat with Sullivan, Keck, and the frontiersman Tom Compton on a bluff above the river, enjoying plates of Digby’s reconstituted corned-beef hash and watching the sun wester.

“The trouble with Preston Finch,” Sullivan said, “is that he doesn’t know how to yield a point.”

“Nor does Erasmus,” Tom Compton said. “He’s not a Partisan, just a general-purpose jackass. Spent three years in Jeffersonville brokering hides, but nobody could tolerate the man’s company for long. He’s not made for human companionship.”

“The animals are interesting,” Guilford said. “Like thoats, in the Burroughs novel. Martian mules.”

“Well then maybe you should take a picture of ’em,” Tom Compton said, and rolled his eyes.

By morning it was obvious negotiations had collapsed altogether. Finch wouldn’t speak to Erasmus, though he begged the pilot of the Weston to hold up at least another day. Sullivan, Gillvany, and Robinson went specimen-collecting in the forests near Erasmus’ grazing pastures, obviously hoping the issue would by some miracle be settled before they returned to camp. And Guilford set up his camera by the kraal.

Which brought Erasmus stomping out of his lopsided sod hut like an angry dwarf. Guilford had not had any personal introduction to the herder and he tried to refrain from flinching.

Erasmus — not much above five foot tall, his face lost in Biblical curls of beard, dressed in patched denim overalls and a snakeskin serape, stopped a careful distance from Guilford, frowning and breathing noisily. Guilford nodded politely and went about the business of adjusting his tripod. Let the Old Man of the Mountain make the first move.

It took time, but Erasmus eventually spoke. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

“Photographing the animals, if that’s all right.”

“You might have asked first.”

Guilford didn’t respond. Erasmus breathed a few minutes more, then. “So that’s a camera, is it?”

“Yes sir,” Guilford said, “a Kodak plate camera.”

“You take plate photos? Like in National Geographic?”

“Just about exactly like.”

“You know that magazine — National Geographic?”

“I’ve worked for it.”

“Eh? When?”

“Last year. Deep Creek Canyon. Montana.”

“Those were your pictures? December 1919?”

Guilford gave the snake herder a longer look. “Are you a member of the Society, Mr., uh, Erasmus?”

“Just call me Erasmus. You?”

“Guilford Law.”

“Well, Mr. Guilford Law, I’m not a member of the National Geographic Society, but the magazine comes upriver once in a while. I take it in trade. Reading material is hard to come by. I have your photographs.” He hesitated. “These pictures of my stock — they’ll be published?”

“Perhaps,” Guilford said. “I don’t make those decisions.”

“I see.” Erasmus pondered the possibilities. Then he drew in a great gulp of the heavy kraal air. “Would you care to come back to my cabin, Guilford Law? Now that Finch is gone, maybe we can talk.”

Guilford admired the snake farmer’s collection of National Geographic stacked on a wooden shelf — fifteen issues in all, most of them water-stained and dog-eared, some held together with binding twine, sharing space with equally tattered obscene postcards, cheap Westerns, and a recent Argosy Guilford hadn’t seen. He praised the meager library and said nothing about the pressed-earth floor, the reek of crudely cured hides, the oven-like heat and dim light, or the filthy trestle table decorated with evidence of meals long finished.

At Erasmus’ prodding Guilford reminisced for a time about Deep Creek Canyon, the Gallatin River, Walcott’s tiny fossil crustaceans: crayfish from the siliceous shale, unbelievably ancient, unless you accepted Finch’s caveats about the age of the Earth. The irony was that Erasmus, an old Darwinian hand who had been born in Milwaukee and lived downstream from the alien Rheinfelden, found the idea of Montana creek beds intensely exotic.

Talk drifted at last to the subject of Preston Finch. “Don’t mean to offend,” Erasmus said, “but he’s a pompous blowhard, and that’s that. Wants twenty head of snake at ten dollars a head, if you can imagine such a thing.”

“The price isn’t fair?”

“Oh, the price is fair — more than fair, actually; that’s not the problem.”

“You don’t want to sell twenty head?”

“Sure I do. Twenty head at that price would keep me through the winter.”

“Then, if I may ask, what’s the problem?”

“Finch! Finch is the problem! He comes into my home with his nose in the air and talks to me like I’m a child. Finch! I wouldn’t sell Preston Finch a road apple for a fortune if I was starving.”

Guilford considered the impasse. “Erasmus,” he said finally, “we can do more and go farther with those animals than without. The more successful the survey, the more likely you are to see my photographs in print. Maybe even in the Geographic.”

“My animals?”

“Your animals and you yourself, if you’re willing to pose.”

The snake breeder stroked his beard. “Well. Well. I might pose. But it makes no difference. I won’t sell my animals to Finch.”

“I understand. What if I asked you to sell them to me?”

Erasmus blinked and slowly smiled. “Then maybe we have the making of a bargain. But look, Guilford Law, there’s more to it. The animals will carry your boats above the Falls and you can probably follow the river as far as the Bodensee, but if you want pack animals into the Alps someone will have to herd them from above the falls to the shore of the lake.”

“You can do that?”

“I’ve done it before. Lot of herds winter there. That’s where most of my stock comes from. I would be willing to do it for you, sure — for a price.”

“I’m not authorized to negotiate, Erasmus.”

“Bullshit. Let’s talk terms. Then you can go dicker with the treasury or whatever you have to do.”

“All right… but one more thing.”

“What?”

“Are you willing to part with that Argosy on your shelf?”

“Eh? No. Hardly. Not unless you have something to trade for it.”

Well, Guilford thought, maybe Dr. Farr wouldn’t miss his copy of Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy.

Erasmus’ farm below the Rheinfelden. His kraal, the fur snakes. Erasmus with his herd. Storm clouds rising in the NW; Tom Compton predicts rain.

Postscriptum. With the aid of our “Martian mules” we will be able to portage the folding motor-launches — clever light constructions, white oak and Michigan pine, sixteen-footers with watertight storage and detachable skags — and travel above the cascades probably as far as Lake Constance (which Erasmus calls the Bodensee). All that we have collected and learned to date sails back to J’ville with the Weston.

Preston Finch I think resentful of my parley with Erasmus — he looks at me from under his solar topee like an irritable Jehovah — but Tom Compton seems impressed: he is at least willing to speak to me lately, not just suffer my presence on Sullivan’s account. Even offered me a draw on his notorious spittle-drenched pipe, which I politely declined, though perhaps that put us back to Square One — he has taken to waving his oilcloth bag of dried leaf at me laughing in a manner not altogether flattering.

We march in the morning if weather is at all reasonable. Home seems farther away than ever, the land grows stranger by the day.

Chapter Nine

Caroline adjusted to the rhythms of her uncle Jered’s household, strange as those rhythms were. Like London, or most of the world these days, there was something provisional about her uncle’s home. He kept odd hours. Often it was left to Alice (and more often now, Caroline herself) to mind the store. She found herself learning the uses of nuts and bolts, of winches and penny nails and quicklime. And there was the mildly entertaining enigma of Colin Watson, who slept on a cot in the storeroom and crept in and out of the building like a restless spirit. Periodically he would take an evening meal at the Pierce table, where he was faultlessly polite but about as talkative as a brick. He was gaunt, not gluttonous, and he blushed easily, Caroline thought, for a soldier. Jered’s table talk was sometimes coarse.

Lily had adjusted easily enough to her new environment, less easily to the absence of her father. She still asked from time to time where Daddy was. “Across the English Channel,” Caroline told her, “where no one has been before.”

“Is he safe?”

“Very safe. And very brave.”

Lily asked about her father most often at bedtime. It was Guilford who had always read to her, a ritual that left Caroline feeling faintly and unreasonably jealous. Guilford read to Lily with a wholeheartedness Caroline couldn’t match, distrustful as she was of the books Lily liked, their unwholesome preoccupation with fairies and monsters. But Caroline took up the task in his absence, mustering as much enthusiasm as she could. Lily needed the reassurance of a story before she could wholly relax, abandon vigilance, sleep.

Caroline envied the simplicity of the ritual. Too often, she carried her own burden of doubt well into the morning hours.

Still, the summer nights were warm and the air rich with a fragrance that was, though strange, not entirely unpleasant. Certain native plants, Jered said, blossomed only at night. Caroline imagined alien poppies, heavy-headed, narcotic. She learned to leave her bedroom window open and let the flowered breezes play over her face. She learned, as the summer progressed, to sleep more easily.

It was Lily’s sleeplessness, as July waned, that served as notice that something had changed in Jered’s house.

Lily with dark bands beneath her eyes. Lily picking dazedly at breakfast. Lily silent and grim at the dinner table, cringing away from Caroline’s uncle.

Caroline found herself unwilling to ask what was wrong — wanting nothing to be wrong, hating the idea of yet another crisis. She summoned her courage one warm night after another chapter of “Dorothy,” as Lily called these repetitious fables, when Lily was still restless.

The little girl drew her blanket above her chin. “It wakes me up when they fight.”

“When who fight, Lily?”

“Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered.”

Caroline didn’t want to believe it. Lily must be hearing other voices, perhaps from the street.

But Lily’s room had only a postage stamp of a window, and it looked out on the back alley, not the busy market street. Lily’s room was in fact a reconstructed closet off the rear hall, a closet Jered had converted into a tiny but comfortable bedchamber for his niece. Enough space for a girl, her bear, her book, and for her mother to sit a while and read.

But the closet shared a wall with Jered and Alice’s bedroom, and these walls weren’t especially thick. Did Jered and Alice argue, late at night, when they thought no one could hear? They seemed happy enough to Caroline… a little aloof, perhaps, moving in separate spheres the way older couples often do, but fundamentally content. They couldn’t have argued often before or Lily would have complained or at least showed symptoms.

The arguments must have started after Colin Watson arrived.

Caroline told Lily to ignore the sounds. Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered weren’t really angry, they were only having disagreements. They really loved each other very much. Lily seemed to accept this, nodded and closed her eyes. Her demeanor improved a little over the next few days, though she was still shy of her uncle. Caroline put the matter out of her mind and didn’t think of it again until the night she fell asleep halfway through a chapter of Dorothy and woke, well after midnight, cramped and uncomfortable, next to Lily.

Jered had been out. It was the sound of the door that woke her. Lieutenant Watson had been with him; Jered said a few inaudible words before the Lieutenant retired to his cellar. Then came Jered’s heavy tread in the corridor, and Caroline, afraid for no reason she could define, pulled Lily’s door closed.

She felt a little absurd, and more than a little claustrophobic sitting cross-legged in this lightless chamber in her nightgown. She listened to the unbroken rhythm of her daughter’s breath, gentle as a sigh. Jered rumbled down the hallway on his way to bed, trailing a steam-engine reek of tobacco and beer.

Now she heard Alice’s low voice greet him, almost as deep as a man’s, and Jered’s, all chest and belly. At first Caroline couldn’t distinguish the words, and she couldn’t hear more than a phrase even when they began to raise their voices. But what she did hear was chilling.

… don’t know how you could get involved… (Alice’s voice.)

… doing my Goddamned duty… (Jered.)

Then Lily woke and needed comforting, and Caroline stroked her golden hair and soothed her.

… you know he might be killed…

… nothing of the kind!

… Caroline’s husband! Lily’s father!

… I don’t rule the world… I didn’t… wouldn’t…

And then quite suddenly the voices lapsed into silence. She imagined Jered and Alice dividing the big bed into territory, marking borders with shoulders and hips, as she and Guilford had sometimes done, after an argument.

They know something, she thought. Something about Guilford, something they don’t want to tell me.

Something bad. Something frightening.

But she was too tired, too shocked to make sense of it. She kissed Lily mechanically and retreated to her own room, to her open window and lazily twining curtains and the odd perfume of the English night. She doubted she could sleep, but slept in spite of herself; she didn’t want to dream but dreamed incoherently of Jered, of Alice, of the sad-eyed young Lieutenant.

Chapter Ten

The summer of 1920 was a chill one, at least in Washington, for which people blamed the Russian volcanoes, the fiery line of geologic disturbance which marked the eastern border of the Miracle and which had been erupting sporadically since 1912, at least according to the refugees who left Vladivostok before the Japanese troubles. Blame it on volcanoes, Elias Vale thought, on sunspots, on God, the gods — all one and the same. He was simply glad to step out of the dreary rain, even into the drearier Main Hall of the National Museum, currently under renovation — work which had been postponed in 1915 and each of the four following years, but for which Eugene Randall had finally prodded funds from the national treasury.

Randall turned out to be an administrator who took his work seriously, the worst kind of boor. And a lonely man, compounding the vice. He had insisted on bringing Vale to the museum the way mothers insist on displaying their infants: the admiration is expected and its absence would be considered an insult.

I am not your friend, Vale thought. Don’t humiliate yourself.

“So much of this work was postponed for so long,” Randall was saying. “But at last we’re making headway. The problem is not what we lack but what we have — the sheer volume of it — like packing a trunk that’s a size too small. Whale skeletons to the South Hall, second story, west wing, and that means marine invertebrates to the North Hall, which means the picture gallery has to be enlarged, the Main Hall renovated…”

Vale gazed blankly at the scaffolding, the tarpaulins protecting the marbled floor. Today was Sunday. The workers had gone home. The museum was gloomy as a funeral parlor, the corpse on view being Man and All His Works. Rain curtained the leaded windows.

“Not that we’re rich.” Randall led him up a flight of stairs. “There was a time when we had almost enough money — the old days — bequests thick as fleas, it seems now. The permanent fund is a shadow of itself, only a few residual legacies, useless railroad bonds, a dribble of interest. Congressional appropriations are all we can count on, and Congress has been chary since the Miracle, though they’re paying for the repairs, steel stacks for the library…”

“The Finch expedition,” Vale added, moved by an impulse that might have been his god’s.

“Aye, and I pray they’re safe, the situation being what it is. We have six sitting congressmen on the Board of Regents, but in matters of state I doubt we rank alongside the English Question or the Japanese Question. Though I may be maligning Mr. Cabot Lodge.”

For weeks Vale’s god had left him more or less alone, and that was pleasant: pleasant to focus on simple mortal concerns, his “indulgences,” as he thought of his drinking and whoring. Now, it seemed, the divine attention had been once again provoked. He felt its presence in his belly. But why here? Why this building? Why Eugene Randall?

As well ask, Why a god? Why me? The real mysteries.

On into the labyrinth, to Randall’s oak-lined office, where he had papers to pick up, a stop between the latest afternoon salon of Mrs. Sanders-Moss and an evening seance, the latter strictly private, like an appointment with an abortionist.

“I know there’s tension with the English on the issue of arming the Partisans. I fervently hope no harm comes to Finch, unlikable as he may be. You know, Elias, there are religious factions who want to keep America out of the New Europe altogether, and they’re not shy about writing to the Appropriations Committee… Ah, here we are.” A manila file extracted from his desk top. “That’s all I need. Now I suppose it’s on to the infinite… no, I can’t joke about it.” Shyly: “This isn’t meant to insult you, Elias, but I do feel the fool.”

“I assure you, Dr. Randall, you’re not being foolish.”

“Pardon me if I’m not convinced. Not yet. I—” He paused. “Elias, you look pale. Are you all right?”

“I need—”

“What?”

“Some air.”

“Well, I— Elias?”

Vale fled the room.

He fled the room because his god was rising and it was going to be bad, that was obvious, a full visitation, he felt it, and the manifestation had clogged his throat and soured his stomach.

He meant to retrace his steps to the door — Randall vainly calling after him — but Vale took a wrong turn and found himself in a lightless gallery where the bones of some great alien fish, some benthic Darwinian monster, had been suspended by cords from the ceiling.

Control yourself. He managed to stand still. Randall would have no patience with operatic gestures.

But he desperately wanted to be alone, at least for a moment. In time the disorientation would pass, the god would manipulate his arms and legs, and Vale himself would become a passive, semiconscious observer in the shell of his own body. The agony would retreat and eventually be forgotten. But now it was too imminent, too violent. He was still himself — vulnerable and afraid — and yet he was in a presence, surrounded by a virulently dangerous other Self.

He sank to the floor begging for oblivion; but the god was slow, the god was patient.

The inevitable questions ran through his tortured mind. Why me? Why am I elected for this duty, whatever it is? And to Vale’s surprise, this time the god offered replies: wordless certainties, to which Vale appended inadequate words.

Because you died, the phantom god responded.

This was chilling. I’m not dead, Vale protested.

Because you drowned in the Atlantic Ocean in 1917 when an American troop ship took a German torpedo.

The god’s voice sounded like Vale’s grandfather, the ponderous tone the old man had adopted when he harped about Bull Run. The god’s voice was made of memories. His memories, Elias Vale’s memories. But the words were wrong. This was nonsense. It was insanity.

You died the day I took you.

In an empty and ruined brick building by the Ohio River. How could both those things be true? A warehouse by a river, a violent death in the Atlantic?

He whispered, “I died?”

Wrenching silence, except for Randall’s timid footsteps in the dark beyond the bone-draped gallery.

“Then,” Vale asked, “is this — the Afterlife?”

He received no answer but a vision: the museum in flames, and then a blackened ruin, and stinking green gods walking like insectile conquerors among the toppled bricks and heatless ashes.

“Mr. Vale? Elias?”

He looked up at Randall and managed a rictus of a grin. “I’m sorry. I—”

“Are you ill?”

“Yes. A little.”

“Perhaps we should call off the, uh, meeting tonight.”

“No need.” Vale felt himself stand. He faced Randall. “Occupational hazard. I only need a breath of air. Couldn’t find the door.”

“You should have said something. Well, follow me.”

Out into the cold of the early evening. Out into a rainy, empty street. Out into the Void, Elias Vale thought. Somewhere deep inside himself, he felt an urge to scream.

Chapter Eleven

Keck and Tuckman couldn’t say what hazards might lie ahead. According to their instruments, the new Rheinfelden was at roughly the location of the old European cascade, but the approximation was crude, and the white-water rapids that used to run below the falls were either absent or buried under a deeper, slower Rhine. Sullivan saw this as more evidence for a Darwinian that had evolved somehow in parallel with the old Europe, in which the ancient tumble of a single rock might have changed the course of a river, at least within certain limits. Finch put it down to the absence of human intervention. “The old Rhine was fished, locked, navigated, and exploited for more than a thousand years. Naturally it came to follow a different course.” Whereas this Europe was untouched, Edenic.

Guilford reserved his opinion. Either explanation seemed plausible (or equally implausible). He knew only that he was tired: tired of distributing supplies among the crude saddlebags of Erasmus’ snakes; tired of manhandling the big Stone-Galloway boats, whose much touted “lightness” turned out to be a relative thing; tired of pacing the fur snakes and their load as they portaged the Rheinfelden in a miserable drizzle.

They came down at last to a pebble-sharp beach from which the boats could be safely launched. Supplies were divided equally between the waterproof fore-and-aft compartments of the boats and the saddlebags of the fur snakes. Erasmus would herd the animals to their summer pastures at the eastern extremity of Lake Constance and had agreed to meet the expedition there.

Launching the boats would have to wait for morning. There was only enough daylight left to pitch the tents, to nurse fresh aches, to pry open ration tins, and to watch the swollen river, green as a beetle’s back and wide as Boston Bay, as it hurried toward the falls.

Guilford did not wholly trust the boats.

Preston Finch had commissioned and named them: the Perspicacity, the Orinoco, the Camille (after Finch’s late wife), and the Ararat. The motors were prototypes, small but powerful, screws protected from rocks by the skags and the engine compartments from high water by a series of canvas shields. The boats would do well enough, Guilford thought, if the Rhine remained relatively placid as far as Lake Constance. But they would be worse than useless against white water. And their advantage in weight was offset by the need to pack jerricans of gasoline, a stiff load to portage and a waste of potentially useful space.

But the boats would be cached at the Bodensee and would function more than adequately on the return trip, stripped of motors and absent gasoline, with the river current to carry them. And they worked satisfactorily the first day out, though the noise of the engines was deafening and the stink of exhaust obnoxious. Guilford enjoyed being close to the water rather than riding above it — to be a part of the river, resisted by its flow and rocked by its eddies, a small thing in a large land. The rain passed, the day brightened, and the gorge walls were gaudy with vine-like growths and capped with gnarled pagoda trees. Surely we have outpaced Erasmus and his snakes, Guilford thought, and Erasmus might be the only other human being within a hundred square miles, barring a few vagrant Partisans. The land owns us now, Guilford thought. The land, the water, the air.

Camp where a nameless creek enters the Rhine. Pool of calm water, Keck fishing for thorn and blue maddies. Miniature sage-pine among the rocks, foliage almost turquoise, dwarfed by winds a rocky soil.

Postscriptum. The fish are abundant will make a palatable evening meal, though Diggs proclaims his martyrdom as he cleans them. Offal goes into the river — billyflies chase it downstream. (The billyflies will bite if provoked; we sleep under mosquito netting tonight. Other insects not especially common or venomous, although a crablike creature made off with one of Keck’s fish — nabbed it from a wetrock scuttled into the water with it! “Claws like a lobster,” Keck says cheerfully. “Count your toes, gentlemen!”)

The next day they were forced to portage a rocky rapids, a grim task without pack animals. The boats were muscled ashore and the route surveyed; fortunately the pebbled river margin remained fairly broad and there was a ready supply of driftwood — dry, hollow flute logs that had been tumbled against the gorge wall by spring floods — to serve as makeshift rollers. But the portage exhausted everyone and wasted a day; by sundown Guilford was only just able to drag his aching bones under the mosquito netting and sleep.

In the morning he loaded and helped launch the Perspicacity, alongside Sullivan, Gillvany, and Tom Compton. Perspicacity was last in the water; by the time they reached mid-river the lead boat, Finch’s Ararat, was already out of sight beyond the next bend. The river ran fast and shallow here and Guilford sat foremost watching for rocks, ready with an oar to steer the keel away from obstacles.

They were making steady progress against the current when the motor coughed and died.

The sudden silence startled Guilford. He was able to hear the drone of the Camille, a hundred yards ahead, and the lapping of water, and Sullivan swearing quietly as he pulled back the canvas shield and opened the motor compartment.

Without an engine the Perspicacity slowed at once, balanced between momentum and river current. The Rhine gorge was suddenly static. Only water moved. No one spoke.

Then Tom Compton said, “Loose the other oars, Mr. Gillvany. We need to turn and make for shore.”

“Only a little water in the compartment,” Sullivan said. “I can restart the motor. I think.”

But Tom Gillvany, who did not much care for river travel, nodded uneasily and unhooked the oars.

Guilford used his own oar to bring the boat around. He took a moment to wave at Camille, signaling the problem, and Keck waved back acknowledgment and began to turn. But the Camille was already alarmingly far away. And now the shore had begun to reverse, to slip away. The Rhine had taken control of Perspicacity.

The pebbled beach from which they had launched swept past. “Oh, Jesus,” Gillvany moaned, paddling hectically. Sullivan, white-faced, abandoned the engine and took up an oar. “Make a steady pace,” Tom Compton said, his low voice not unlike the rumble of the water. “When we’re close enough I’ll snub the boat. Here, give me the bow line.”

Guilford thought of the rapids. He supposed everyone in the boat had begun to think of the rapids. He could see them now, a line of white into which the river vanished. The shore seemed no closer.

“Steady!” the frontiersman barked. “Dammit, Gillvany, you’re flapping like a fuckin’ bird! Dig the water!”

Gillvany was a small man and chastened by the outburst. He bit his lip and pushed his oar into the river. Guilford worked in silence, arms straining. Sweat drenched his face, a tang of salt when he licked his lips. The day was no longer cool. Darwinian shore birds, like coal-black sparrows, swooped blithely overhead.

The river bottom was jagged now, shark-fin rocks trailing white wakes as Perspicacity neared shore. There was a quick hollow crack from the aft of the boat: “Lost a skag,” Sullivan said breathlessly. “Pull!”

The next snap was the screw, Guilford guessed; it sent a grinding shudder through the boat. Gillvany gasped, but no one spoke. The roar of the water was loud.

The shore became a tumble of boulders, close but forbidding, rushing past perilously quickly. Tom Compton swore and grabbed the bow rope, stood and leaped from the boat. He landed crushingly hard on a slick flat-topped rock, rope unwinding like an angry snake beside him as Guilford paddled vainly against the current. The frontiersman righted himself hastily and snubbed the rope around a granite spur just as Perspicacity drew it taut. The rope sang and whipped from the water. Guilford braced himself as the boat bucked and twisted wildly toward the rocks. Sullivan fell against the motor block. Gillvany, unprepared, rolled over the starboard side into the wash.

Guilford threw a coil of rope into the water where Gillvany had disappeared, but the entomologist was gone — vanished into the quick green water and away, no wake or eddy to mark his passage.

Then Perspicacity struck the rocks and heeled up under the fierce pressure of the Rhine, Guilford clinging to an oarlock with all the strength that was left in him.

Above the unnamed rapids, stranded for two days now. Perspicacity under repair. Skag and screw can be replaced from spares.

Tom Gillvany cannot.

Postscriptum. I did not know Tom Gillvany well. He was a quiet, studious man. According to Dr. Sullivan, a scholar respected in his field. Lost to the river. We searched downstream but could not recover his body. I will remember his shy smile, his sobriety, and his unashamed fascination with the New Continent.

We all mourn his passing. The mood is grim.

A hollow where the Rhine gorge is rocky and steep, a sort of natural cavern, shallow but tall as a church: Cathedral Cavern, Preston Finch has named it. Cairn of stone to honor Dr. Gillvany. Driftwood marker with legend inscribed by Keck with a rock hammer, In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany, and the date.

Postscriptum. Silent as we are, there is not much to hear: the river, the wind (rain has closed us in once more), Diggs humming Rock of Ages as he stokes the fire.

We have been bloodied by this land.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, we launch again. And onward. I miss my wife and child.

Because he could not sleep, Guilford left his tent after midnight and navigated past the embers of the fire to the mouth of the cave, outlined in steely moonlight, where Sullivan sat with a small brass telescope, peering into the night sky. The rain had passed. Mare’s-tail clouds laced the moon. Most of the sky above the Rhine gorge was bright with stars. Guilford cleared his throat and made a space for himself amidst the rock and sand.

The older man looked at him briefly. “Hello, Guilford. Mind the billyflies. Though they’re sparse tonight. They don’t like the wind.”

“Are you an astronomer as well as a botanist, Dr. Sullivan?”

“Strictly an amateur stargazer. And I’m looking at a planet, actually, not a star.”

Guilford asked which planet had attracted Sullivan’s attention.

“Mars,” the botanist said.

“The red planet,” Guilford said, which was just about the sum of his knowledge concerning that heavenly body, except that it possessed two moons and had been the subject of some fine writing by Burroughs and the Englishman, Wells.

“Less red than it once was,” Sullivan said. “Mars has darkened since the Miracle.”

“Darkened?”

“Mars has seasons, Guilford, just like Earth. The ice caps retreat in summer, the darker areas expand. The planet appears reddish because it is probably a desert of oxidized iron. But lately the red is palliated. Lately,” he said, bracing the telescope against his knee, “there are shades of blue. The shift has been measured spectrographically; the eye is a little less sensitive.”

“Meaning what?”

Sullivan shrugged. “No one knows.”

Guilford peered into the moon-silvered sky. The Conversion of Europe was mystery enough. Daunting to think of another planet grown similarly wild and strange. “May I use the telescope, Dr. Sullivan? I’d like to see Mars myself.”

He would look the mystery in the eye: he was that brave, at least.

But Mars was only a swimming point of light, lost in the Darwinian heavens, and the wind was chill and Dr. Sullivan was not talkative, and after a time Guilford went back to his tent and slept restlessly until morning.

Chapter Twelve

The end product of fear, fear not baseless but without any tangible object, was anesthesia. Each new omen seemed bleaker, until bleakness became the landscape through which Caroline must toil, eyes averted, registering nothing. Or at least as little as possible.

She told her aunt that Lily was having trouble sleeping. Alice turned and looked absently into the depths of the dry goods store, past rows of stitched white grain bags, into a latticework of sunbeams from the high rear window. She wiped her hands on her apron. “Jered comes in at odd hours. He may have disturbed her, walking down the hall. I’ll speak to him.”

The secret was kept, she was not privy to it, and Caroline was privately relieved. Lily slept better after that, though she had picked up nervous tics in the absence of her father: tugging her lower lip until it was sore, twining her hair around her fingers. She hated to be left alone.

Colin Watson continued to haunt the house, a smoky presence. Caroline tried to draw him in to conversation but he said little about his life or work; only that the Service seemed to have forgotten him, that he had few duties to perform save rounds of guard duty at the Armory: he had been misplaced, he seemed to suggest, in Kitchener’s obsessive shuffling of the British forces. He couldn’t say why there were so many soldiers in London these days. “It’s like a plague,” Caroline said, but the Lieutenant wouldn’t be provoked. He only smiled.

Soldiers and warships. Caroline hated to go down to the harbor now; most of the British Navy seemed to have anchored there in the last few weeks, battered dreadnaughts bristling with guns. The women in the market street talked about war.

War with whom, for what purpose, Caroline couldn’t fathom. It might have something to do with the Partisans, the returned dregs of Europe, their ridiculous claims and threats; or the Americans or the Japanese or — she tried not to pay attention.

“I miss Daddy,” Lily announced. It was Sunday. The dry-goods store was closed; Jered and Alice were taking inventory and Caroline had brought Lily to the river, to the blue river under a hot blue sky, to watch the sailing ships or see a river monster. Lily liked the silt snakes as much as Caroline hated them. Their great necks, their cold black eyes.

“Daddy will come back soon,” she told her daughter, but Lily only frowned, hardened against consolation. Faith is a virtue, Caroline thought, but nothing is certain. Nothing. We pretend, for the sake of children.

How perfect Lily was, sitting splay-legged on a log bench with her doll in her lap. “Lady” was the doll’s name. “Lady, Lady,” Lily sang to herself, a two-note song. The doll’s flesh-colored paint had been worn down to bone porcelain on her cheeks and forehead. “Lady, dance,” Lily sang.

It was at that moment, an uneasy peace brief as the tolling of a bell, that Caroline saw Jered hurrying down a log-paved embankment toward her. Her heart skipped abeat. Something was wrong. She could see the trouble in his eyes, in his walk. Without thinking, she put her hands on Lily’s shoulders; Lily said, “That hurts!”

Jered stood before her breathlessly. “I wanted to talk to you, Caroline,” he said, “before you saw the Times.”

He was patient and compassionate, but in the end Caroline remembered it as if she had read it in the brutal cadences of a newspaper headline:

and then, more terrifying:

But these were only naked facts. Far worse was the knowledge that Guilford was beyond her help, impossibly far away, possibly injured, possibly dead. Guilford dead in the wilderness and Caroline and Lily alone.

She asked her uncle the awful question. “Is he dead?” she whispered, while the earth twisted under her feet and Lily ran to the bench where Lady had been abandoned, eyelids drooping, with her skirt hiked over her head.

“Caroline, no one knows. But the ships were attacked well after they put the expedition ashore at the Rheinfelden. There’s no reason to believe Guilford has been hurt.”

They will all lie to me now, Caroline thought: make me a widow and tell me he’s fine. She turned her face to the sky, and the sunlight through her eyelids was the color of blood.

Chapter Thirteen

For the purpose of the séance they drove to Eugene Randall’s apartment, a sad widower’s digs in Virginia, one wall a shrine to his deceased spouse Louisa Ellen. Stepping inside was like stepping into the archaeology of a life, decades reduced to potsherds and clay tablets.

Randall kept the lights low and proceeded directly to the liquor cabinet. “I don’t want to be drunk,” he explained. “I just don’t want to be sober.”

“I could use a shot myself,” Elias Vale said.

Inevitably, Vale lost himself to his god.

He thought of it as “summoning” the god, but in fact it was Vale who was summoned, Vale who was used. He had never volunteered for this duty. He had never been given a choice. If he had resisted… but that didn’t bear thinking about.

Randall wanted to speak to his lost Louisa Ellen, the horse-faced woman in the photographs, and Vale made a show of calling to her across the Great Barrier, eyes rolled to conceal his own agony. In fact he was retreating into himself, stepping out of the god’s path, becoming passive. No longer his, the need to draw breath, the rebellious tides of bile and blood.

He was only distantly conscious of Randall’s halfhearted questions, though the emotional gist of it was painfully obvious. Randall, the lifelong rationalist, wanted desperately to believe he could speak to Louisa Ellen, who had been carried off by a vicious pneumonia less than a year ago; but he couldn’t easily abandon a lifetime’s habit of thought. So he asked questions only she could answer, wanting proof but terrified that he might not get it.

And Vale, for the first time, felt another presence in addition to his god. This one was a tortured, partial entity — a shell of suffering that might actually once have been Louisa Ellen Randall.

Her voice choked out of Vale’s larynx. His god modulated the tone.

Yes, Vale said, she remembered that summer in Maine, long before the Miracle of the New Europe, a cottage by the sea, and it had rained, hadn’t it, all that cool July, but that had not made her unhappy, only grateful for beach walks whenever the clouds abated, for the fire in the hearth at night, for her collection of chalky seashells, for the patchwork quilt and the feather bed.

And so on.

And when Randall, florid with the pulse of blood through his clotted veins, asked. “Louisa, it is you, isn’t it?” — Vale said yes. When he asked, “Are you happy?” — Vale said, “Of course.” Here his voice faltered fractionally, because the Louisa Ellen Randall in his mind screamed out her suffering and her hatred for the god that had abducted her, who brought her here unwilling from— from—

But these were the Mysteries.

It was not Louisa Ellen’s voice (though it still sounded like hers) when Randall’s flagging skepticism began to recover and Vale’s god delivered a sort of coup de grâce, an oracle, a prophecy: a warning to Randall that the Finch expedition was doomed and that Randall should protect himself from the political consequences. “The Partisans have already fired on the Weston,” Vale said, and Randall blanched and stared.

It was a concise and miraculous prophecy. The wire services featured the story the following night. It ran under banner headlines in the Washington papers.

Vale neither knew nor cared about all that. His god had left him, that was the welcome fact. His aching body was his own again, and there was enough liquor in the house to keep him in a therapeutic oblivion.

Chapter Fourteen

Lake Constance. The Bodensee.

It was not much more, geographically speaking, than a wide place in the river. But in the morning mist it might have been a great placid ocean, gentle as silk, fresh sunlight cutting through the fog in silver sheets. The northern shore, just visible, was a rocky abeyance thick with silent forest, mosque trees and sage-pine and stands of a broad-leafed, white-boled tree for which not even Tom Compton had a name. Moth-hawks swept over the shimmering water in rotating swarms.

“More than a thousand years ago,” Avery Keck said, “there was a Roman fort along these shores.” Keck, who had taken Gillvany’s place in the Perpicacity, spoke over the ragged syncopation of the boat’s small motor. “In the Middle Ages it was one of the most powerful cities in Europe. A Lombard city, on the trade route between Germany and Italy. Now it might never have existed. Only water. Only rocks.”

Guilford wondered aloud what had happened to the vanished Europeans. Had they simply died? Or could they have traveled to a mirror-Earth, in which Europe survived intact and the rest of the world had gone feral and strange?

Keck was a gaunt man of about forty years, with the face of a small-town undertaker. He looked at Guilford dolefully. “If so, then the Europeans have their own fresh wilderness to hack and gouge at and go to war over. Just like us, God help ’em.”

Camp at Bodensee. Diggs at his fire. Sullivan, Betts, Hemphill at their tents. Meadow green with a small leafy spreading plant like turquoise clover. High overcast, cool gusty wind.

Postscriptum. Or perhaps I should stop pretending these notes are “postscripts” admit that they are letters to Caroline. Caroline, I hope you see them one day soon.

Journey largely uneventful since Gillvany’s tragic death, though that event hangs over us like a cloud. Finch in particular has grown sullen uncommunicative. I think he blames himself. He writes relentlessly in his notebook, says little.

We made our camp in the meadows Erasmus described. Have seen herds of wild fur snakes in great profusion, moving over the land like cloud shadows on a sunny day. Ever-resourceful, Tom Compton has even stalked and killed one, so we dine on snake meat — greasy steaks that taste like wildfowl, but a refreshing change after tinned rations. Our boats are securely stowed well up a beach, under tarps and beneath an outcropping of mossy granite, effectively hidden from all but the most exhaustive search. Though who do we suppose will find them in this empty land?

We await the arrival of Erasmus with our pack snakes and supplies. Tom Compton insists we could have had any number of animals free of charge — they are (often quite literally!) all around us — but Erasmus’s beasts are trained to pack and bridle and have already relieved us of the need to ferry all our kit by boat.

This assumes Erasmus will show up as promised.

We all know each other very well by now — all our quirks idiosyncrasies, which are legion — and I have even had several rewarding conversations with Tom Compton, who has shown me more respect since the near wreck of the Perspicacity. In his eyes I am still the pampered Easterner who makes a soft living with a photo-box (as he calls it), but I have shown enough initiative to impress him.

Certainly he has had a hard enough life to justify his skepticism. Born in San Francisco an impoverished mixed-breed, by his own account the descendant of slaves, Indians, failed goldminers — he managed to teach himself to read and found employment in the Merchant Marine, eventually made his way to Jeffersonville, a rough town with uses for his rough talents and tolerance for his rough manners.

I know you would find him crude, Caroline, but he is a fundamentally good man useful in a crisis. I’m glad of his company.

We have waited a week already for Erasmus and will wait at least another. Fortunately I have the copy of Argosy for which I traded Finch’s geology tome. The magazine contains an installment of E. R. Burroughs’ Lost Kingdom of Darwinia, more of his imagined “ancient hinterland” complete with dinosaurs, noble savages, and a colony of evil-minded Junkers to rule them. A princess requires rescue. I know your disdain for this type of fiction, Caroline, and I have to admit that even Burroughs’ wild Darwinia pales against close contact with the real thing: these too-solid hills and shadowy, cool forests. But the magazine is a delightful distraction I am much envied by the other Expeditionaries, since I have been chary about loaning the volume.

I find myself looking forward to civilization — the tall buildings, the newsstands, and such.

Erasmus arrived with the pack animals and accepted payment in the form of a check drawn on a Jeffersonville bank. He spent an evening in camp and expressed his condolences, though not his surprise, regarding Gillvany’s death.

But his arrival was overshadowed by Avery Keck’s discovery. Keck and Tom Compton had gone on another snake hunt, Keck observing both the local geography and the frontiersman’s tracking skills. Not that the snakes required much tracking, as Keck explained over the campfire. They had simply cut off one snake from the herd and taken it down with a single shot from Tom Compton’s rifle. Dragging the carcass back to camp was the difficult part.

More interesting, Keck said, was that they had come across an insect nest and its midden.

The insects, Keck said, were ten-legged invertebrate carnivores, distantly related to the stump runners Guilford had encountered outside London. They tunneled in boggy lowland areas where the soil was loose and wet. A fur snake or any other animal wandering into the insects’ territory would be repeatedly bitten by the colony’s venomous drones, then swarmed and stripped of its meat. Cleaned bones were meticulously shuttled to the colony’s rim — the famous midden.

“The older a colony, the bigger its midden,” Keck said. “I saw one nest in the Rhinish lowlands that had grown like a fairy ring, about a hundred meters across. The one Tom and I found is about average, in my experience. A perfect circle of pitted white bones. Mainly the bones of unlucky fur snakes, but—” Keck unwrapped the oilcloth package he had carried back to camp. “We found this.”

It was a long, high-domed, spike-toothed skull. It was white as polished ivory, but it glittered redly in the firelight.

“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 chaos.

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 each 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.

But it was finished at last, a holistic library of galactic history and a fortress against the evaporation of matter. Noospheres ringed the Archive in a joyous orbital dance. Perhaps, beyond the still-inviolable boundaries of the singularities, new universes were being born from the ashes of the old. That possibility was being investigated; faint signals flashed between this and other Archives, proposals for universe-building that daunted all of Sentience Itself. Perhaps one day…

But that was speculation. For now, galactic sentience reveled in what it had created.

Monofilaments of Higgs distortion swept the Archive, spooling history in sequential order. Sentient nodes and subnodes delighted in exploring the past — one, two, three times, as the Archive was read and reread. Knowledge became involute, knew itself; sophants among the noospheres debated the difference between the Knowing and the Known.

Tragedy struck without warning and without explanation some 10³ years after the structure was finished.

The Archive, the noospheres discovered, had been quietly infiltrated and corrupted. Semisentient entities — self-propagating, evolving parasite codes hidden in the network of Higgs signals that passed between galaxies — had commandeered the Archive’s structural protocols. Information was being lost, irretrievably, moment by moment.

Worse, information was being changed.

The Archive evolved in to a new and distorted form. Subsentient virtual entities, relics of a war that had devastated a distant galaxy long before the beginning of this galaxy’s Eclectic Age, were using the Archive as a platform to preserve their algorithms against thermal death. They lacked moral regard for any entity not themselves, but they were fully aware of the purpose of the Archive and of its designers. They had not simply captured the structure, they had taken it hostage.

Static memories embedded in the Archive as records became, in effect, new seed-sentiences: new lives, trapped in an epistructure they could never perceive and manipulated by entities beyond their conception. These new lives, though products of the Archive’s corruption, could not be terminated or erased. That would stain the conscience of Sentience beyond redemption. In theory, the Archive could be emptied, cleansed, and rewritten… but that would be equivalent to murder on a collosal scale.

Moreover, these lives must be saved, must be remembered. It was the goal Sentience had pursued since its inception, to redeem itself from death. The new and strange quasi history evolving inside the Archive could not simply be abandoned.

Noospheres retreated from the Archive, fearful of contagion; Sentience conferred with itself, and a thousand years passed.

The Archive must be repaired, it was decided. The invaders must be expelled. The new seed-sentiences would ultimately be lost, along with the Archive itself, if nothing was done. The viral invaders would not be satisfied until the cooling universe contained nothing but their own relentless codes. It was a task no less difficult than building the Archive, and far more problematic — because the cleansing would have to begin within the Archive itself. Individual sentient nodes by the billions would have to enter the Archive both physically and virtually. And they would meet a cunning opposition.

Individuals — in effect, ghosts — who had long since merged their identities into the noospheres were stripped of their eons of augmentation, rendered nearly mortal for their penetration into the corrupted Archive.

One of those billions was an ancient terrestrial node which had once been named Guilford Law. This seed-consciousness, barely complex enough to retain its own ancient memory, was launched with countless others into the Archive’s fractal depths.

History’s last war had begun.

Guilford Law remembered war. It was war that had killed him, after all.