Darwinia

It was his first real view of the new world. The Thames mouth and London were the single most populous territory of the continent: most known, most seen, often photographed, but still wild — smug, Guilford thought, with wildness. The distant shore was dense with alien growth, hollow flute trees and reed grasses obscure in the gathering shadows of a chill afternoon. The strangeness of it burned in Guilford like a coal. After all he had read and dreamed, here was the tangible and impossible fact itself, not an illustration in a book but a living mosaic of light and shade and wind. The river ran green with false lotus, colonies of domed pads drifting in the water: a hazard to navigation, he’d been told, especially in summer, when the blooms came down from the Cotswolds in dense congregations and choked the screws of the steamships. He caught a glimpse of John Sullivan on the glass-walled promenade deck. Sullivan had been to Europe in 1918, had made collections at the mouth of the Rhine, but that experience obviously hadn’t jaded him; there was an intensity of observation in the botanist’s eyes that made conversation unthinkable.

Soon enough there was human litter along the shore, rough cabins, an abandoned farm, a smoldering garbage pit; and then the outskirts of the Port of London itself, and even Caroline took an interest.

The city was a random collation on the north bank of the river. It had been carved into the wilderness by soldiers and loyalist volunteers recalled by Lord Kitchener from the colonies, and it was hardly the London of Christopher Wren: it looked to Guilford like any smoky frontier town, a congregation of sawmills, hotels, docks, and warehouses. He identified the silhouette of the city’s single famous monument, a column of South African marble cut to commemorate the losses of 1912. The Miracle had not been kind to human beings. It had replaced rocks with rocks, plants with stranger plants, animals with vaguely equivalent creatures — but of the vanished human population or any sentient species, no trace had ever been found.

Taller than the memorial pillar were the great iron cranes dredging and improving the port facilities. Beyond these, most striking of all, was the skeletal framework of the new St. Paul’s Cathedral, astride what must be Ludgate Hill. No bridges crossed the Thames, though there were plans to build one; a variety of ferries accommodated the traffic.

He felt Lily tug his sleeve. “Daddy,” she said solemnly. “A monster.”

“What’s that, Lil?”

“A monster! Look.”

His wide-eyed daughter pointed off the port bow, upriver.

Guilford told Lily the name of the monster even as his heart began to beat faster: a silt snake, the settlers called it, or sometimes river snake. Caroline took his other arm tightly as the chatter of voices ceased. The silt snake lifted its head above the ship’s prow in a motion startlingly gentle, given that its skull was a blunt wedge the size of a child’s coffin attached to a twenty-foot neck. The creature was harmless, Guilford knew — placid, literally a lotus-eater — but it was frighteningly large.

Below the waterline the creature would have anchored itself in the mud. The silt snake’s legs were boneless cartilaginous spurs that served to brace it against river currents. Its skin was an oily white, mottled in places with algal green. The creature appeared fascinated by the human activity ashore. It aimed its apposite eyes in turn at the harbor cranes, blinked, and opened its mouth soundlessly. Then it spotted a mass of floating lotus pads and scooped them from the water in one deft bobbing motion before submerging again into the Thames.

Caroline buried her head against Guilford’s shoulder. “God help us,” she whispered. “We’ve arrived in Hell.”

Lily demanded to know if that was true. Guilford assured her that it wasn’t; this was only London, new London in the new world — though it was an easy mistake to make, perhaps, with the gaudy sunset, the clanking harbor, the river monster and all.

Stevedores undertook the unloading of the ferry. Finch, Sullivan, and the rest of the expedition put up at the Imperial, London’s biggest hotel. Guilford looked wistfully at the leaded windows and wrought-iron balconies of the building as he rode with Caroline and Lily away from the harbor. They had hired a London taxi, essentially a horsecart with a cloth roof and a feeble suspension; they were bound for the home of Caroline’s uncle, Jered Pierce. Their luggage would follow in the morning.

A lamplighter moved through the dusky streets among boisterous crowds. There was not much left of the fabled English decorum, Guilford thought, if this mob of sailors and loud women was any sample. London was plainly a frontier town, its population culled from the rougher elements of the Royal Fleet. There might be shortages of coal and oil, but the grog shops appeared to be doing a roaring business.