Darwinia

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 pe

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 su

“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 a

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.