Darwinia

The shore became a tumble of boulders, close but forbidding, rushing past perilously quickly. Tom Compton swore and grabbed the bow rope, stood and leaped from the boat. He landed crushingly hard on a slick flat-topped rock, rope unwinding like an angry snake beside him as Guilford paddled vainly against the current. The frontiersman righted himself hastily and snubbed the rope around a granite spur just as Perspicacity drew it taut. The rope sang and whipped from the water. Guilford braced himself as the boat bucked and twisted wildly toward the rocks. Sullivan fell against the motor block. Gillvany, unprepared, rolled over the starboard side into the wash.

Guilford threw a coil of rope into the water where Gillvany had disappeared, but the entomologist was gone — vanished into the quick green water and away, no wake or eddy to mark his passage.

Then Perspicacity struck the rocks and heeled up under the fierce pressure of the Rhine, Guilford clinging to an oarlock with all the strength that was left in him.

Above the unnamed rapids, stranded for two days now. Perspicacity under repair. Skag and screw can be replaced from spares.

Tom Gillvany cannot.

Postscriptum. I did not know Tom Gillvany well. He was a quiet, studious man. According to Dr. Sullivan, a scholar respected in his field. Lost to the river. We searched downstream but could not recover his body. I will remember his shy smile, his sobriety, and his unashamed fascination with the New Continent.

We all mourn his passing. The mood is grim.

A hollow where the Rhine gorge is rocky and steep, a sort of natural cavern, shallow but tall as a church: Cathedral Cavern, Preston Finch has named it. Cairn of stone to honor Dr. Gillvany. Driftwood marker with legend inscribed by Keck with a rock hammer, In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany, and the date.

Postscriptum. Silent as we are, there is not much to hear: the river, the wind (rain has closed us in once more), Diggs humming Rock of Ages as he stokes the fire.

We have been bloodied by this land.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, we launch again. And onward. I miss my wife and child.

Because he could not sleep, Guilford left his tent after midnight and navigated past the embers of the fire to the mouth of the cave, outlined in steely moonlight, where Sullivan sat with a small brass telescope, peering into the night sky. The rain had passed. Mare’s-tail clouds laced the moon. Most of the sky above the Rhine gorge was bright with stars. Guilford cleared his throat and made a space for himself amidst the rock and sand.

The older man looked at him briefly. “Hello, Guilford. Mind the billyflies. Though they’re sparse tonight. They don’t like the wind.”

“Are you an astronomer as well as a botanist, Dr. Sullivan?”

“Strictly an amateur stargazer. And I’m looking at a planet, actually, not a star.”

Guilford asked which planet had attracted Sullivan’s attention.

“Mars,” the botanist said.

“The red planet,” Guilford said, which was just about the sum of his knowledge concerning that heavenly body, except that it possessed two moons and had been the subject of some fine writing by Burroughs and the Englishman, Wells.

“Less red than it once was,” Sullivan said. “Mars has darkened since the Miracle.”

“Darkened?”

“Mars has seasons, Guilford, just like Earth. The ice caps retreat in summer, the darker areas expand. The planet appears reddish because it is probably a desert of oxidized iron. But lately the red is palliated. Lately,” he said, bracing the telescope against his knee, “there are shades of blue. The shift has been measured spectrographically; the eye is a little less sensitive.”

“Meaning what?”

Sullivan shrugged. “No one knows.”

Guilford peered into the moon-silvered sky. The Conversion of Europe was mystery enough. Daunting to think of another planet grown similarly wild and strange. “May I use the telescope, Dr. Sullivan? I’d like to see Mars myself.”