Darwinia

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

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

Vale threw up his hands and left the room.

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

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

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

“Don’t know.”

“A week? A month?”

Shrug.

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

“Not their style, is it?”

The gods, he meant.

“You’re saying I have no choice?”

“I wasn’t offered one. Toast, Elias?”

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

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

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

“As what, my catamite?”

“Cousin, nephew, illegitimate child…”

“And then?”

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

“No offense, but I hope so.”

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

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

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

“Nothing at all.”

“Ah.”

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

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

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

Just now, in any case, the Sanders-Moss table talk turned most often to the loss of the Finch expedition, the prospect of war. The Hearst papers had been touting a war with England, claimed to have evidence that the English were fu

When they were together in the town house they tried to ignore one another. When they did talk — generally after Vale had taken a drink — they talked about their gods.

“It doesn’t just threaten,” Vale said. Another cold night, trapped in doors with Crane for company, a bitter wind rattling the casement windows. Te

“Immortality,” Crane said calmly, paring an apple with a kitchen knife.

“You too?”

“Oh, yes. Me too.”

“Do you — believe?”

Crane peered at him quizzically. “Elias. When was the last time you cut yourself shaving?”

“Eh? I can’t remember—”

“Long ago?”

“Long ago,” Vale conceded. “Why?”

“Appendicitis, influenza, consumption? Broken bones, toothache, hangnail?”

“No, but — what are you saying?”

“You know the answer, Elias. You just don’t have the nerve to test yourself. Haven’t you ever been tempted, standing over a basin with a razor in your hand?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

Crane spread his left hand on the dining table and drove the knife smartly through it. The blade cracked through small bones and into wood. Vale recoiled and blinked.

Crane winced, briefly. Then he smiled. He tightened his grip on the shaft of the knife and pulled the blade out of his hand. A drop of blood welled out of the wound. Just one. Crane dabbed it away with a napkin.

The skin beneath was smooth, pink, seamless.

“Christ,” Vale whispered.

“Apologies for damaging the table,” Crane said. “But you see what I mean.”

Chapter Eighteen

From the Journal of Guilford Law:

Excuse my handwriting. The fire is warm but doesn’t cast much useful light. Caroline, I think of you reading this and take some comfort in the thought. I hope it is warm where you are.

We are relatively warm here by the standards we’ve grown accustomed to — maybe too warm. U

We left this morning on our hobble-legged expedition to the heart of the ruins, Tom Compton, Dr. Sullivan, and I. We must have made a comical sight (Diggs certainly seemed to think so) — the three of us bundled in snake fur, white as dandelion clocks, two of us limping (on opposite legs), four days’ supplies lashed to a sledge behind a grunting snake. A “snipe-hunt,” Digby calls this little voyage.

In any case, we ignored the jibes, and soon enough our beast had pulled us deeper into the ruins, into the oppressive silence of the city. I ca

Tom Compton led the fur snake by its rope halter. The frontiersman was in no mood to talk, so I hung back with Dr. Sullivan, hoping the sound of a human voice would dispel the gloom of these immense, repetitive alleys. But the mood had affected Sullivan, too.

“We’ve been assuming the city was built by intelligent beings,” he said. “That may not be so.”

I asked him to explain.

“Appearances are deceptive. Have you ever seen an African termite hill? It’s an elaborate structure, often taller than a man. But the only architect is evolution itself. Or think of the regularity and complexity of a honeycomb.”

“You’re saying we might be inside some kind of insect hive?”

“What I’m saying is that although these structures are obviously artificial, the uniformity of size and presumably of function argues against a human builder.”

“What kind of insect carves granite blocks the size of the Washington Monument?”

“I can’t imagine. Worse, it’s unprecedented. No one has reported anything like it. Whoever or whatever built this city, they seem to have left no progeny and had no obvious antecedents. It’s almost a separate creation.”

This mirrored my own thoughts too closely. For all its strangeness, Darwinia possesses its own beauty — moss-green meadows, sage-pine glades, gentle rivers. The ruins have none of that charm. For endless hours we traveled the city’s relentlessly regular streets, sun angling low behind monoliths of cracked stone. The snow ahead of us was trackless and blank. Neither Sullivan nor I thought twice about that until Tom pointed out the peculiarity of it. In the four or five days since the last snowfall no animal had left its track here, nor any flying things, not even moth-hawks. Moth-hawks are common in these parts; whole flocks of them roost in the ruined structures at the rim of the city. (Easy game, if you’re desperate enough to want to eat the things. You sneak up on a roosting flock at night, with a torch; the light dazzles them; a man can kill six or seven with a stick before they gather their wits and fly away.) But not here. Granted, there’s little enough forage deep in these stone-choked warrens. Still, the absence of life seems ominous. It heightens the nerves, Caroline, and I admit that as the afternoon passed and the shadows lengthened we were all three of us on our toes, apt to start at the slightest commotion.