Darwinia

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 a

“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.