What Guilford saw was a dense green wetland combed by a westerly wind — the saltwater marshes at the vast mouth of the Rhine. Stromatolites rose like unearthly monuments, and flute trees had colonized the delta everywhere the silt rose high enough to support their spidery roots. The steam packet followed a shallow but weed-free channel — slowly, because soundings were crude and the silt often shifted after a storm — toward a denser, greener distance. Jeffersonville was a faint plume of smoke on the flat green horizon, then a smudge, then a brown aggregation of shacks built into reed-stalk hummocks or perched on stilts where the ground was firm enough, and everywhere crude docks and small boats and the reek of salt, fish, refuse, and human waste. Caroline had thought London was primitive; Guilford was thankful she hadn’t seen Jeffersonville. The town was like a posted warning: here ends civilization. Beyond this point, the anarchy of Nature.
There were plenty of fishing boats, canoes, and what looked like rafts cobbled from Darwinian timber, all clotting the net-draped wharves, but only one other vessel as large as the
“We?” Guilford asked.
“You and I. Then you can set up your lenses. Capture us all at the dock.
But there was little firm footing here in the marshes. You kept to the boardwalks or risked being swallowed up. Guilford wondered how much of Darwinia would be like this — the blue sky, the combing wind, the quiet threat.
Sullivan notified Finch that he and Guilford were going to hire a guide. Guilford was lost as soon as the wharves were out of sight, hidden by fishermen’s shacks and a tall stand of mosque trees. But Sullivan seemed to know where he was going. He had been here in 1918, he said, cataloging some of the marshland species. “I know the town, though it’s bigger now, and I met a few of the old hands.”
The people they passed looked rough-hewn and dangerous. The government had begun handing out homestead grants and paid passage not long after the Miracle, but it took a certain kind of person to volunteer for frontier life, even in those difficult days. Not a few of them had been fugitives from the law.
They lived by fishing and trapping and their wits. Judging by the visible evidence, fresh water and soap were in short supply. Men and women alike wore rough clothing and had let their hair grow long and tangled. Despite which, several of these shabby individuals looked at Sullivan and Guilford with the amused contempt of a native for a tourist.
“We’re going to see a man named Tom Compton,” Sullivan said. “Best tracker in Jeffersonville, assuming he isn’t dead or out in the bush.”
Tom Compton lived in a wooden hut away from the water. Sullivan didn’t knock but barged through the half-open door — Darwinian manners, perhaps. Guilford followed cautiously. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness he found the hut sparse and clean-smelling, the plank floor dressed with a cotton rug, the walls hung with various kinds of fishing and hunting tackle. Tom Compton sat placidly in one corner of the single room, a large man with a vast, knotted beard. His skin was dark, his race obviously mixed. He wore a chain of claws around his neck. His shirt was woven of some coarse local fiber, but his trousers appeared to be conventional denim, half-hidden by high waterproof boots. He blinked at his visitors without enthusiasm and took a long-stemmed pipe from the table by his elbow.
“Bit early for that, isn’t it?” Sullivan asked.
Tom Compton struck a wooden match and applied it to the bowl of the pipe. “Not when I see you.”
“You know why I’m here, Tom?”
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“We’re traveling inland.”
“Doesn’t concern me.”
“I’d like you to come with us.”
“Can’t do it.”
“We’re crossing the Alps.”
“I’m not interested.” He passed the pipe to Sullivan, who took it and inhaled the smoke. Not tobacco, Guilford thought. Sullivan passed the pipe to him, and Guilford looked at it with dismay. Could he politely refuse, or was this something like a Cherokee summit meeting, a smoke instead of a handshake?
Tom Compton laughed. Sullivan said, “It’s the dried leaves of a river plant. Mildly intoxicating, but hardly opium.”
Guilford took the gnarly briar. The smoke tasted the way a root cellar smells. He lost most of it to a coughing fit.
“New hand,” Tom Compton said. “He doesn’t know the country.”
“He’ll learn.”