Evolution

"Ugly, ugly," Joan murmured. "These islands, the birds and animals. Wonderful, of course, but ugly. Islands have always been great laboratories of evolution. The isolation. The emptiness, populated by a handful of species who raft or fly in, and then radiate into all the empty niches. Like that cormorant. That’s how far you get in three million years, apparently: halfway between a pelican and a penguin. Give it another few megayears, though, and those useless wings will have become genuine flippers, the feathers properly waterproof, and I wonder what they will become then? No wonder Darwin’s eyes were opened here. You can see selection working."

"Mother—"

"You understand all that, of course." She grimaced, her masklike face twisting. "You know, the fate of the old is to turn into one’s own parents; this is just the way my mother used to speak to me. No conversation that didn’t turn into a lecture."

They pulled into the shore by a shallow beach. The launch grounded itself, and Lucy hopped out, her sandaled feet crunching on the coarse black sand. She turned back to help her mother, and then the two of them made the launch fast and briskly hauled out their gear.

As Joan began to set up the traps, Lucy took a couple of the hypo rifles and went patrolling along the beach.

The beach itself was an eerie place. The black lava sand was littered by equally black rocks. Even the sea was made to look black, like a sea of oil, by the darkness of its bed. In the distance she could make out mangrove, trees capable of exploiting the salty water, a splash of green against the mineral black and red.

And marine iguanas were lined up here like fat meter-long sculptures, their expressionless faces turned to the sun. They were themselves black, so dark and still it took a second glance to recognize them as living things and not an eerie formation of rope lava. Stranded here on Darwin’s laboratory after rafting across with tortoises and turtles, the iguanas’ ancestors had been dry-land creatures, tree climbers. They were gradually adapting to living off algae they strained out of seawater. But they would spit out the excess water — the air was filled with their hawking; the little jets spouting from their mouths sparkled in the sunlight — and they had to rely on the heat of the sun to bake the thin repast in their stomachs.

Lucy kept her rifle ready. If feral kids were around, it paid to be wary.

During the scramble for places on the last few boats back to the mainland, kids had been dumped here by desperate parents. The weak ones had quickly died, leaving their bones to litter the beaches and rocky outcrops, like the bones of sea lions and iguanas and albatrosses. But some of the kids had survived. In fact the word "kids" was a misnomer, for they had already been here long enough to spawn a second generation, children who had grown up knowing nothing but these barren bits of rock and the endless oceans, kids even more wordless and without culture than their parents. Feral kids, without tools, with only a rudimentary language — and yet human, capable of being cleaned up and educated.

And also capable of taking a bite out of your leg.

Joan’s traps were simple: nothing much more than concealed nets and snares, baited with rich-smelling spicy food. When she had set them up, she and Lucy settled down out of sight in the shade of an outcrop of tuff — crumbling, easily eroded lava — and prepared to wait for the feral children.

Since Rabaul, life had been hard for Joan and her daughter — but then it had been hard for everyone on the planet. Even though her grand empathetic project had been crushed, Joan hadn’t stopped working. With wide-eyed little Lucy in tow, she had retreated here, to Galapagos.

Paradoxically these fragile islands had been relatively well preserved through the greater global catastrophe. Once seventeen thousand people had lived here, mostly emigrants from mainland Ecuador. Before Rabaul there had been a constant friction between the needs of this growing, resentful population and the unique wildlife, nominally preserved by Ecuador’s national park legislation. But the islands had always been fed by the mainland. When everything had spun apart after Rabaul, when the ships had stopped coming, most of that population had fled back home.

So the islands, largely free of people — and their companions, the rats and the goats, and their waste products, sewage and oil — had, in their modest way, begun to prosper again.

Joan and Lucy — and a handful of others, including Alyce Sigurdardottir until her death — had settled in the ruins of what had once been the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz, and, with the locals who remained, had devoted themselves to helping the creatures that had so intrigued Darwin himself through the unfolding extinction.