Darwinia

In 1877 the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had mapped the canals of Mars. For decades afterward his maps were duplicated and refined and accepted as fact, until better lenses proved the canals were an illusion, unless Mars itself had changed since then: hardly unthinkable, in light of what happened to the Earth. Perhaps something had twined through the solar system like a thread borne on a breath of air, something ephemeral but unthinkably immense, touching the cold worlds of the outer solar system, moving through rock, ice, frozen mantle, lifeless geologies. Changing what it touched. Moving toward the Earth.

The sky had been full of signs and omens. In 1907, the Tunguska fireball. In 1910, Halley’s Comet. Some, like Guilford Law’s mother, thought it was the end of the world. Even then.

The sky that March night was brighter over the northeastern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean than it had been during the Comet’s visit. For hours, the horizon flared with blue and violet light. The light, witnesses said, was like a wall. It fell from the zenith. It divided the waters. It was visible from Khartoum (but in the northern sky) and from Tokyo (faintly, to the west).

From Berlin, Paris, London, all the capitals of Europe, the rippling light enclosed the entire span of the sky. Hundreds of thousands of spectators gathered in the streets, sleepless under the cold efflorescence. Reports flooded into New York until fourteen minutes before midnight.

At 11:46 Eastern Time, the transatlantic cable fell suddenly and inexplicably silent.

It was the era of the fabulous ships, the Great White Fleet, the Cunard and White Star liners, the Teutonic, the Mauretania, monstrosities of empire.

It was also the dawn of the age of the Marconi wireless. The silence of the Atlantic cable might have been explained by any number of simple catastrophes. The silence of the European land stations was far more ominous.

Radio operators flashed messages and queries across the cold, placid North Atlantic. There was no CQD or the new distress signal, SOS, none of the drama of a foundering ship, but certain vessels were mysteriously unresponsive, including White Star’s Olympic and Hamburg-American’s Kronprinzzessin Cecilie — flagship vessels on which, moments before, the wealthy of a dozen nations had crowded frost-rimmed rails to see the phenomenon that cast such a gaudy reflection over the winter-dark and glassy surface of the sea.

The spectacular and unexplained celestial lights vanished abruptly before dawn, scything away from the horizon like a burning blade. The sun rose into turbulent skies over most of the Great Circle route. The sea was restless, winds gusty and at times violent as the day wore on. Beyond roughly 15° west of the Prime Meridian and 40° north of the equator, the silence remained absolute and unbroken.

First to cross the boundary of what the New York wire services had already begun to call “the Wall of Mystery” was the aging White Star liner Oregon, out of New York and bound for Queenstown and Liverpool.

Her American captain, Truxton Davies, felt the urgency of the situation although he understood it no better than anyone else. He distrusted the Marconi system. The Oregon’s own radio rig was a cumbersome sparker, its range barely a hundred miles. Messages could be garbled, rumors of disaster were often exaggerated. But he had been in San Francisco in 1906, had fled along Market Street barely ahead of the flames, and he knew too well what sort of mischief nature could make, given a chance.

He had slept through the events of the night before. Let the passengers lose sleep gawking at the sky; he preferred the homely comfort of his bunk. Roused before dawn by a nervous radio operator, Davies reviewed the Marconi traffic, then ordered his Chief Engineer to stoke the boilers and his Chief Steward to boil coffee for all hands. His concern was tentative, his attitude still skeptical. Both the Olympic and the Kronprinzzessen Cecilie had been only hours east of the Oregon. If there was an authentic CQD he would have the First Officer rig the ship for rescue; until then… well, they would keep alert.