Darwinia

Creation modified by a worldwide flood, which had deposited fossil animals at various altitudes or buried them in mud and silt, as Eden itself must have been buried. Guilford had studied much of it before, though Finch buttressed his argument with a wealth of detail: the one hundred classifications of drift and diluvium; geological wheels in which extinct beasts were depicted in neat, separate categories. But that single phrase (“the appearance of age”) troubled him. It made all knowledge provisional. The world was a stage set — it might have been built yesterday, freshly equipped with mountains and mastodon bones and human memories — which gave the Creator an unseemly interest in deceiving his human creations and made no useful distinction between the work of time and the work of a miracle. It seemed to Guilford unnecessarily complex — though why, come to think of it, should the world be simple? More shocking, perhaps, if one could render the universe and all its stars and planets in a single equation (as the European mathematician Einstein was said to have tried to do).

Finch would say that was why God had given humanity the Scriptures, to make sense of a bewildering world. And Guilford had to admire the weight and poetry, the convolute logic of Finch’s work. He wasn’t geologist enough to argue with it… though he did come away with the impression of a lofty cathedral erected on a few creaking two-by-fours.

And Sullivan’s question nagged. How had Guilford caught a Darwinian bug, if the new continent was truly a separate creation? For that matter, how was it that men could digest certain Darwinian plants and animals? Some were poisonous — far too many — but some were nourishing, even delectable. Didn’t that imply a hidden similarity, a common, if distant, origin?

Well, a common Creator, at least. Common ancestry, Sullivan had implied. But what was impossible on the face of it. Darwinia had existed for hardly more than a decade… or might have existed much longer, but not in any form sensible to the Earth.

That was the paradox of the New Europe. Look for miracles, find history; look for history, run headlong into the blunt edge of a miracle.

Rain chased the expedition for a day and a half, the lowlands glittering under a fine silver mist. The Rhine undulated through wild forests, Darwinian forests of a particularly deep and mossy green, finally passed into a gentle plain Carpeted with a broad-leafed plant Tom Compton called fingerwort. The fingerwort had begun to bloom, tiny golden blossoms giving the meadows the glow of a premature autumn. It was an inviting view, by Darwinian standards, but if you walked in the fingerwort, the frontiersman said, you wore boots to your knees or risked a case of hives caused by the plants’ astringent yellow sap. Hovering insects called nettleflies swarmed the fields by day, but despite their thorny appearance they didn’t bite human flesh and would even perch on a fingertip, their translucent bodies finely filigreed, like miniature Christmas ornaments.

The Weston anchored in mid-river. Guilford, newly mended though still somewhat weak, went ashore to help Sullivan collect fingerwort and a dozen other meadow species. The voucher specimens were prepared between the frames of Sullivan’s plant-press, the dried flats layered into a box wrapped in oilcloth. Sullivan showed him a particularly vivid orange flower common along the sandy shore. “For all its structure, it might be cousin to an English poppy. But these flowers are male, Mr. Law. Insects disperse pollen by literally devouring the stamens. The female flower — here’s one: you see? — is hardly a flower at all in the conventional sense. More like a thread dipped in honey. One immense pistil, with a Ciliate structure to carry the male pollen to the gynoecium. Insects are often trapped on it, and pollen with them. The pattern is common in Darwinia, non-existent among terrestrial plants. The physical resemblance is real but coincidental. As if the same process of evolution had acted through different channels — like this river, which approximates the Rhine in general but not in the specific. It drains roughly the same highlands to roughly the same ocean, but its elbows and meanders are entirely unpredictable.”

And its whirlpools, Guilford thought, and its rapids, though the river had been gentle enough so far. Did the river of evolution pose similar hazards?

Sullivan, Gillvany, Finch and Robinson ruled the daylight hours — Digby, the expedition’s cook, called them “Plants and Ants, Stones and Bones.” Night belonged to Keck, Tuckinan and Burke, surveyors and navigators, with their sextants and stars and maps by lamplight. Guilford enjoyed asking Keck exactly where the expedition was, because his answers were inevitably strange and wonderful. “We’re entering the Cologne Embayment, Mr. Law, and we’d be seeing Düsseldorf before long, if the world hadn’t been turned on its head.”