Darwinia

Chapter Twenty-Three

Fireworks bloomed over the Washington Monument, celebrating the victory in the Atlantic. Sudden lights colored the Reflecting Pool. The night air smelled of gunpowder; the crowd was gleeful and wild.

“You’ll have to leave town,” Crane said, smiling vaguely, hands in his pockets. He walked with a Brahman slouch, at once imperial and self-mocking. “I assume you know that.”

When had Vale last seen a public celebration? A few halfhearted Fourth of July fêtes since the strange summer of 1912. But the victory in the Atlantic had rung across the country like the tolling of a bell. In this throng, at night, they wouldn’t be recognized. It was possible to talk.

He said, “I would have liked time to pack.”

Crane, unlike the gods, would tolerate a complaint.

“No time, Elias. In any case, people like us don’t need worldly possessions. We’re more like, ah, monks.”

The celebration would go on until morning. A glorious little war. Teddy Roosevelt would have approved. The British had surrendered after devastating losses to their Atlantic fleet and their Darwinian colonies, fearing an attack on Kitchener’s rump government in Canada. The terms of the victory weren’t harsh: a weapons embargo, official endorsement of the Wilson Doctrine. The conflict had lasted all of a week. Not so much war, Vale thought, as Diplomacy by Other Means, and a warning to the Japanese should they choose to turn their martial attention westward.

Of course, the war had served another purpose, the gods’ purpose. Vale supposed he would never know the sum of that purpose. It might be no more than the increase of enmity, violence, confusion. But the gods were generally more incisive than that.

There had been a sidebar in the Post: British nationals and sympathizers were being questioned in co

“Colorful expression. You aren’t, of course. You’re too useful. Think of it this way: you’re discarding a persona. The police will find you dead in the ashes of your town house, or at least a few suggestive bones and teeth. Case closed.”

“Whose bones will they be?”

“Does it matter?”

He supposed not. Some other victim. Some impediment to the due and proper evolution of the cosmos.

Crane said, “Take this.” It was an envelope containing a rail ticket and a roll of hundred-dollar bills. The destination printed on the ticket was New Orleans. Vale had never been to New Orleans. New Orleans might as well have been East Mars, as far as he was concerned.

“Your train leaves at midnight,” Crane said.

“What about you?”

“I’m protected, Elias.” He smiled. “Don’t worry about me. Perhaps we’ll meet again, in a decade or two or three.”

God help us. “Do you ever wonder — is there any end to it?”

“Oh, yes,” Crane said. “I think we’ll see the end of it, Elias, don’t you?”

The fireworks reached a crescendo. Stars erupted to the roar of ca

And I will sink into obscurity, and maybe that’s for the best.

New Orleans was warm, almost sultry; the spring became tropical. It was a strange town, Vale thought, barely American. It looked transported from some French Caribbean colony, all lacy ironwork and thunder and soft patois.

He took an apartment under an assumed name in a seedy but not slummy part of town. He paid his rent with a fraction of Crane’s money and began scouting second-story offices where he might conduct a little spiritualist business. He felt strangely free, as if he had left his god in the city of Washington. Not true — he understood that — but he savored the feeling while it lasted.

His craving for morphine was not physical, and perhaps that was part of the package of immortality, but he remembered the intoxication fondly and spent a few evenings trolling the jazz bars in search of a co

They must have been god-ridden, Vale decided later. Nothing else made sense. One had a bottle, one had a length of threaded steel rod. They demanded nothing, took nothing. They worked strictly on his face. His immortal skin was slashed and gouged, his immortal skull fractured in several places. He swallowed several of his immortal teeth.

He did not, of course, die.

Swathed in bandages, sedated, he heard a doctor discuss his case with a nurse in a languid Louisiana drawl. A miracle he survived. No one will recognize him after this, God knows.

Not a miracle, Vale thought. Not even a coincidence. The gods who had closed his skin to the morphine needle in Washington could just as easily have staved off these cutting blows. He had been taken because he never would have volunteered.

No one will recognize him.

He healed quickly.

A new city, a new name, a new face. He learned to avoid mirrors. Physical ugliness was not a significant impediment to his work.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Guilford found the Bodensee where a glacial stream entered the lake, frigid water coursing over slick black pebbles. He followed the shoreline slowly, meticulously, riding the fur snake he had named Evangeline. “Evangeline” for no reason save that the name appealed to him; the animal’s gender was a mystery. Evangeline had foraged more successfully than Guilford had over the last week, and her six splined hooves covered ground more efficiently than his toothpick legs.

A gentle sun blessed the day. Guilford had rigged a rope harness to keep himself sprawled on Evangeline’s broad back even when he lost consciousness, and there were times when he drifted into a nodding half sleep, head slumped against his chest. But the sunlight meant he could shed a layer of furs, and that was a relief, to feel air that was not lethally cold against his skin.

As snakes went, Evangeline had proved intelligent. She avoided insect middens even when Guilford’s attention lapsed. She never strayed far from fresh water. And she was respectful of Guilford — perhaps not surprising, given that he had killed and cooked one of her compatriots and set the other free.

He was careful to keep an eye on the horizon. He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.

He credited Evangeline with finding the arch of stone where the expedition’s boats had been cached. She had nosed her way patiently along the pebbled shore, hour by hour, until at last she stopped and moaned for his attention.

Guilford recognized the stones, the shoreline, the hilly meadows just begi

It was the right place. But the tarpaulin was gone, and so were the boats.

Dazed, Guilford let himself down from the fur snake’s back and searched the beach for — well, anything: relics, evidence. He found a charred board, a rusted nail. Nothing else.

The breeze slapped small waves against the shore.

The sun was low. He would need wood for a fire, if he could muster the energy to build one.

He sighed. “End of the road, Evangeline. At least for now.”

“It will be, if you don’t get a decent meal into yourself.”