Darwinia

Throughout the morning he continued to monitor the wireless. It was all questions and queries, relayed with cheery but nervous greetings (“GMOM” — good morning, old man!) from the gnomish fraternity of nautical radiomen. His sense of disquiet increased. Bleary-eyed passengers, aroused by the suddenly more furious pounding of the engines, pressed him for an explanation. At lunch he told a delegation of First Class worriers that he was making up time lost due to “ice conditions” and asked them to refrain from sending cables for the time being, as the Marconi was being repaired. His stewards relayed this misinformation to Second Class and Steerage. In Davies’ experience passengers were like children, poutingly self-important but willing to accept a glib explanation if it would blunt their deep and unmentionable dread of the sea.

The gusty winds and high seas calmed by noon. A tepid sunlight pierced the ragged ceiling of cloud.

That afternoon the forward lookout reported what appeared to be wreckage, perhaps a capsized lifeboat, floating to the northeast. Davies slackened the engines and maneuvered closer. He was on the verge of ordering the boats prepared and cargo nets rigged when his Second Officer lowered his looking glass and said, “Sir, I don’t think it’s wreckage after all.”

They came alongside. It was not wreckage.

What troubled Captain Davies was that he couldn’t say what it was.

It bobbed in the swell, lazy with death, winter sunlight glistening on its long flanks. Some immense, bloated squid or octopus? Some part of some once-living thing, surely; but it resembled nothing Davies had seen in twenty-seven years at sea.

Rafe Buckley, his young First Officer, gazed at the thing as it bumped Oregon at the prow and slowly drifted aft, turning widdershins in the cold, still water. “Sir,” he said, “what do you make of it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what to make of it, Mr. Buckley.” He wished he hadn’t seen it ni the first place.

“It looks like — well, a sort of worm.”

It was segmented, annular, like a worm. But to call it a worm was to imagine a worm large enough to swallow one of the Oregon’s stacks. Surely no worm had ever sported the torn, lacy fronds — fins? a sort of gill? — that arose at intervals from the creature’s body. And there was its color, viscid pink and oily blue, like a drowned man’s thumb. And its head… if that vacuous, saw-toothed, eyeless maw could be called a head.

The worm rolled as it fell away aft, exposing a slick white belly that had been scavenged by sharks. Passengers mobbed the promenade deck, but the smell soon drove all but hardiest of them below.

Buckley stroked his moustache. “What in the name of Heaven will we tell them?”

Tell them it’s a sea monster, Davies thought. Tell them it’s a Kraken. It might even be true. But Buckley wanted a serious answer.

Davies looked a long moment at his worried First Officer. “The less said,” he suggested, “the better.”

The sea was full of mysteries. That was why Davies hated it.

Oregon was the first vessel to arrive at Cork Harbor, navigating in the cold sunrise without benefit of shore lights or channel markers. Captain Davies anchored well away from Great Island, where the docks and the busy port of Queenstown were — or should have been. And here was the unacceptable fact. There was no trace of the town. The harbor was unimproved. Where the streets of Queenstown should have been — should have teemed with exporters, cargo cranes, stevedores, emigrant Irishmen — there was only raw forest sweeping down to a rocky shore.

This was both inarguable and impossible, and even the thought of it gave Captain Davies a sensation of queasy vertigo. He wanted to believe the navigator had brought them by mistake to some wild inlet or even the wrong continent, but he could hardly deny the unmistakable outline of the island or the cloud-wracked coast of County Cork.

It was Queenstown and it was Cork Harbor and it was Ireland, except that every trace of human civilization had been obliterated and overgrown.

“But that’s not possible,” he told Buckley. “Not to belabor the obvious, but ships that left Queenstown only six days ago are at dock in Halifax. If there’d been an earthquake or a tidal wave — if we’d found the city in ruins — but this!”

Davies had spent the night with his First Officer on the bridge. The passengers, waking to the stillness of the engines, began to mob the rails again. They would be full of questions. But there was nothing to be done about it, no explanation or consolation Davies could offer or even imagine, not even a soothing lie. A wet wind had risen from the northeast. Cold would soon drive the curious to cover. Perhaps over dinner Davies could begin to calm them down. Somehow.

“And green,” he said, unable to avoid or suppress these thoughts. “Far too green for this time of year. What sort of weed springs up in March and swallows an Irish town?”