Darwinia

Karen, back from her morning walk, told Guilford a huge sea wheel had washed up on the beach. After lunch (sandwiches on the veranda, though he couldn’t eat more than a bite) he went to have a look at this nautical prodigy.

He took his time, hoarding his energy. He followed a path from the house through dense ferns, through bell trees dripping August nectar. His legs ached almost at once, and he was breathless by the time he saw the ocean. The Oro Delta coast possessed as benign a climate as Darwinia could boast, but summer was often crippling humid and always hot. Clouds stacked over the windless Mediterranean like great marbled palaces, like the cathedrals of vanished Europe.

Last night’s storm had stranded the sea wheel high on the pebbled margin of the beach. Guilford approached the object tentatively. It was immense, at least six feet in diameter, not a perfect circle but a broken ellipse, mottled white; otherwise it looked remarkably like a wagon wheel, the flotsam of some undersea caravan.

In fact it was a sort of vegetable, a deep-water plant, typically Darwinian in its hollow symmetry.

Odd that it had washed up here, to grace the beach behind his house. He wondered what force, what tide or motion of the water, had detached the sea wheel from its bed. Or perhaps it was more evidence of the ongoing struggle between Darwinian and terrestrial ecologies, even in the benthic privacy of the ocean.

On land, in Guilford’s lifetime, the flowering plants had begun to conquer their slower Darwinian analogues. At the verge of the road from Tilson he had lately discovered a wild stand of morning glories, blue as summer. But some of the Darwinian species were returning the favor; skeleton lace and false anemones were said to be increasingly common south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The sea wheel, a fragile thing, would be black and rotted by tomorrow noon. Guilford turned to walk home, but the pain beneath his ribs took him and he chose to rest a moment. He wetted a handkerchief in a tide pool and mopped his face, tasting the salt tang on his lips. His breath came hard, but that was to be expected. Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.

Forced to sit a while, he admired the strangeness of the sea wheel, its heady incongruity. A strange thing washed up on a strange shore: well, I know how that feels.

Last night’s storm had cleared the air. He watched the glossy sea give back the sky its blue. He whistled tunes between his teeth until he felt fit enough to start the journey back.

Karen would be waiting. He hadn’t told her what the doctor had said, at least not the full story, though she obviously suspected something. She would be all right about it, but he dreaded the phone calls from friends, perhaps especially the inevitable call from Lily and all the attendant consequences: a last visit, old sins and old grief hovering in the air like voiceless birds. Not that he wouldn’t like to see her again, but Lily herself was frail these days. At least he wouldn’t outlive her. Small mercies, Guilford thought.

Given these dark musings, he was not especially surprised, when he stood up and turned away from the stranded sea wheel, to find the picket waiting for him some yards down the rocky beach.

Guilford approached the phantom amiably. Skinny and boyish, the picket looked. This wasn’t his double, not anymore. This was someone else. Younger. Older.

He assayed the faintly flickering apparition. “Tell me,” Guilford said, “don’t you get tired of wearing those old Army rags?”

“They were my last human clothes. It wouldn’t seem right to wear something else. And too conspicuous if I don’t wear anything at all.”

“Been a while,” Guilford said.

“Thirty years,” the god said, “give or take.”

“So is this like one of those movies? You show up to unroll the heavenly red carpet? Out of my deathbed into the clouds and violin music?”

“No. But I’ll walk you back to the house, if that’s all right.”

“You don’t have any particular purpose, being here? Out slumming? Not that it isn’t nice to see you…”

“There’s a question I want to ask. But not just yet. Shall we walk? I always did think better on my feet.”

They talked haphazardly as they followed the path through the woods. Guilford wasn’t afraid of the picket, but he did feel a certain nervous excitement. He found himself rambling about Darwinia, how the continent had changed, how the cities and railways and airplanes had civilized it, though there was still plenty of back country for those who like to get lost… as if the picket didn’t know these things.

“You prefer the coast,” the phantom said.