Darwinia

Abby composed herself by devoting her attention to Nick: calming him, making a proper bed for him on the sofa, which Guilford had moved away from the door and into a corner of the room, back facing out. “A fort,” Nick called it. “A fine fort,” Abby told him.

She drew breath through clenched teeth and calculated the hours until morning. People outside want to hurt us, and they’ve cut the power and the telephone lines. We can’t leave and we can’t call for help and we can’t fight back…

Guilford took her aside, along with the young woman Tom Compton had brought to the house. As little as Guilford liked to talk about his past, Abby knew about his daughter, the daughter he had left in London twenty-five years ago. Abby recognized her even before Guilford said, “This is Lily.” Yes, obviously. She had the Law eyes, winter-morning blue, and the same fixed frown.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Abby said; then, realizing how it must sound, “I mean, I wish — under other Circumstances—”

“I know what you mean,” Lily said gravely. “Thank you, Mrs. Law.”

And Abby thought: What do you know about the Old Men? Who let you in on their secrets? How much does Guilford know? Who’s out there in the dark wanting to kill my husband, my child?

No time for that now. These things had become luxuries: fear, anger, bewilderment, grief.

Nicholas looked up at his father’s face as Guilford straightened the blanket over him.

The candlelight made everything strange. The house itself seemed larger — emptier — as if it had expanded into the shadows. Nick knew something was very wrong, that the doors and windows were sealed against some threat. “Bad guys,” he had heard Tom Compton say. Which made Nick think of the movies. Claim jumpers, snake rustlers, burly men with dark circles around their eyes. Killers.

“Sleep if you can,” his father said. “We’ll settle this all up in the morning.”

Sleep was a long way off. Nick looked up at his father’s face with a feeling of loss that stabbed like a knife.

“Good night, Nick,” his father said, stroking his hair.

Nicholas heard, “Good-bye.”

Lily took the kitchen watch.

The house had two doors, front and rear, living room and kitchen. The kitchen was better defended, with its single small window and narrow door. The door was locked. The window was locked, too, but Lily understood that neither door nor window would present much of an obstacle to a determined enemy.

She sat on a wooden chair with Guilford’s old Remington rifle cradled in her lap. Because the room was dark, Lily had opened the blinds a crack and scooted her chair closer to the window. There was no moon tonight, only a few bright stars, but she could see the lights of freighters on the bay, an earthbound constellation.

The rifle was comforting. Even though she had never shot anything larger than a rabbit.

Welcome to Fayetteville, Lily thought. Welcome to Darwinia.

All her life Lily had read about Darwinia, talked about Darwinia — dreamed and daydreamed about Darwinia — to her mother’s great distress. The continent fascinated her. She had wanted since childhood to fathom its strangeness for herself. And here she was: alone in the dark, defending herself against demons.

Be careful, girl, what you wish for.

She knew virtually everything natural science had learned about Darwinia — i.e., not much. Detail in abundance, of course, and even some theory. But the great central question, the simple aching human why, remained unanswered. Interesting, though, that at least one other planet in the solar system had been touched by the same phenomenon. Both the Royal Observatory at Capetown and the National Observatory at Bloemfontein had published photographs of Mars showing seasonal differentiation and an indication of large bodies of water. A new world in the sky, a planetary Darwinia.

Her father’s letters had made sense of all this, though he hardly seemed to understand it himself. Guilford and Tom and all the Old Men had done what Guilford’s friend Sullivan couldn’t: explained the Miracle in secular terms. It was an outlandish explanation, certainly, and she couldn’t imagine what sort of experiment might confirm it. But all this strange theography of Archives and angels and demons could not have arisen in so many places or agreed in so many details if it weren’t substantially true.