Darwinia

The voyage had passed uneventfully. The seas were calm, the days so bright they might have been hammered in blue metal. Watson had used his ample free time to reconsider his life. Compared to some, he had emerged from the tragedy of 1912 relatively lightly. His parents were dead before the Conversion and he had no siblings, no wife or children to grieve for. Only a way of life. A baggage of fading memories. The past was cut loose and the years, absent compass or ballast, had passed terribly quickly. Perhaps it was fitting then that he had blown back to England at last: to this new England, this feverish pseudo-England. To this hot, prosaic Port Authority in a brick blockhouse gray with dust. He identified himself, was shown into a back room and introduced to a portly South African merchant who had volunteered his warehouse to shelter the munitions until the Armory was ready to receive them. Pierce, the man’s name was. Jered Pierce.

Watson put out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Pierce.”

The South African closed Watson’s hand in his own huge paw. “Likewise, sir, I’m sure.”

Caroline was frightened of London but bored in the cramped warren of her uncle’s store. She had taken over her aunt Alice’s chores from time to time, and that was all right, but there was Lily to worry about. Caroline didn’t want her playing alone in the street, where the dust was thick and the gutters unspeakable, and indoors she was a constant terror, chasing the cat or holding tea parties with Alice’s china figurines. So when Alice offered to watch Lily while Caroline took Jered’s lunch to the docks, Caroline was grateful for the break. She felt suddenly unchained and deliciously alone.

She had promised herself she wouldn’t think about Guilford this afternoon, and she tried to focus her attention elsewhere. A group of grubby English children — to think, the youngest of them might have been born in this nightmarish place! — ran past her. One boy dragged a bush jumper behind him on a string; the animal’s six pale green legs pumped frantically and its dark eyes rolled with fear. Maybe it was good, that fear. Good that in this half-human world the terror worked both ways. These were thoughts she could never have shared with Guilford.

But Guilford was gone. Well, there, Caroline thought: admit it. Only disaster could bring him back before autumn, and probably not even that. She supposed he had already entered the back country of Darwinia, a place even stranger than this grim shadow of London.

She had stopped asking herself why. He had explained patiently a dozen times, and his answers made a superficial kind of sense. But Caroline knew he had other motives, unspoken, powerful as tides. The wilderness had called out to Guilford and Guilford had run away to it, and never mind the savage animals, the wild rivers, the fevers and the bandits. Like an unhappy little boy, he had run away from home.

And left her here. She hated this England, hated even to call it that. She hated its noises, both the clatter of human commerce and the sounds of nature (worse!) that leaked through the window at night, sounds whose sources were wholly mysterious to her, a chattering as of insects; a keening as of some small, injured dog. She hated the stench of it, and she hated its poisonous forests and haunted rivers. London was a prison guarded by monsters.

She turned onto the river road. Trenches and sewers trickled their burden of waste into the Thames; raucous gulls raced over the water. Caroline gazed aloofly at the river traffic. Far off across the brown water a silt snake raised its head, its pebbled neck bent like a question mark. She watched the harbor cranes unload a sailing ship — the cost of coal had revived the Age of Sail, though these particular sails were furled into an intricacy of masts. Men hatless or turbaned wheeled crates on immense carts and dollies; sunlit wagons nursed at shadowed loading bays. She stepped into the shade of the Port Authority building, where the air was thick but faintly cooler.

Jered met her and took the lunch box from her hand. He thanked her in his absent-minded way and said, “Tell Alice I’ll be home for supper. And to set another place.” A tall man in a neat but threadbare uniform stood behind him, his eyes frankly focused on her. Jered finally noticed the stare. “Lieutenant Watson? This is Caroline Law, my niece.”

The gaunt-faced Lieutenant nodded at her. “Miss,” he said gravely.

“Mrs.,” she corrected him.

“Mrs. Law.”

“Lieutenant Watson will be boarding in the back room of the store for a while.”

Caroline thought. Oh, will he? She gave the Lieutenant a more careful look.

“The city barracks is crowded,” Jered said. “We take in boarders occasionally. King and Country and all.”

Not my king, Caroline thought. Not my country.

Chapter Seven

“You know,” Professor Randall said, “I think I preferred the old-fashioned God, the one who refrained from miracles.”