Darwinia

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Authors: Robert Charles Wilson

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BOOK: Darwinia
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Annotation
In 1912, the entire European continent and all of the United Kingdom mysteriously vanished during the Miracle, replaced by an alien landscape known as Darwinia. Darwinia seems to be a slice of another Earth, one that diverged from our own millions of years ago and took a separate evolutionary path. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the Miracle as shimmering lights playing across the ocean sky. Now as a grown man, he is determined to travel to Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to steam up the Rhine (or what was once the Rhine) and penetrate the continent’s hidden depths as far as possible. But Law has brought an unwanted companion with him, a mysterious twin who seems to have lived — and died — on an Earth unchanged by the Miracle. The twin first appears to Guilford in dreams, and he brings a message that Darwinia is not what it seems to be — and Guilford is not who he seems to be.
Darwinia
by Robert Charles Wilson
Prologue
1912: March
Guilford Law turned fourteen the night the world changed.
It was the watershed of historical time, the night that divided all that followed from everything that went before, but before it was any of that, it was only his birthday. A Saturday in March, cold, under a cloudless sky as deep as a winter pond. He spent the afternoon rolling hoops with his older brother, breathing ribbons of steam into the raw air.
His mother served pork and beans for dinner, Guilford’s favorite. The casserole had simmered all day in the oven and filled the kitchen with the sweet incense of ginger and molasses. There had been a birthday present, a bound, blank book in which to draw his pictures. And a new sweater, navy blue, adult.
Guilford had been born in 1898; born, almost, with the century. He was the youngest of three. More than his brother, more than his sister, Guilford belonged to what his parents still called “the new century.” It wasn’t new to him. He had lived in it almost all his life. He knew how electricity worked. He even understood radio. He was a twentieth-century person, privately scornful of the dusty past, the gaslight and mothball past. On the rare occasions when Guilford had money in his pocket he would buy a copy of
Modern Electrics
and read it until the pages worked loose from the spine.
The family lived in a modest Boston town house. His Father was a typesetter in the city. His grandfather, who lived in the upstairs room next to the attic stairs, had fought in the Civil War with the 13th Massachusetts. Guilford’s mother cooked, cleaned, budgeted, and grew tomatoes and string beans in the tiny back garden. His brother, everyone said, would one day be a doctor or a lawyer. His sister was thin and quiet and read Robert Chambers novels, of which his father disapproved.
It was past Guilford’s bedtime when the sky grew very bright, but he had been allowed to stay up as part of the general mood of indulgence, or simply because he was older now. Guilford didn’t understand what was happening when his brother called everyone to the window, and when they all rushed out the kitchen door, even his grandfather, to stand gazing at the night sky,he thought at first this excitement had something to do with his birthday. The idea was wrong, he knew, but so concise. His birthday. The sheets of rainbow light above his house. All of the eastern sky was alight. Maybe something was burning, he thought. Something far off at sea.
“It’s like the aurora,” his mother said, her voice hushed and uncertain.
It was an aurora that shimmered like a curtain in a slow wind and cast subtle shadows over the whitewashed fence and the winter-brown garden. The great wall of light, now green as bottle glass, now blue as the evening sea, made no sound. It was as soundless as Halley’s Comet had been, two years ago.
His mother must have been thinking of the Comet, too, because she said the same thing she’d said back then. “It seems like the end of the world…”
Why did she say that? Why did she twist her hands together and shield her eyes? Guilford, secretly delighted, didn’t think it was the end of the world. His heart beat like a clock, keeping secret time. Maybe it was the beginning of something. Not a world ending but a new world beginning. Like the turn of a century, he thought.
Guilford didn’t fear what was new. The sky didn’t frighten him. He believed in science, which (according to the magazines) was unveiling all the mysteries of nature, eroding mankind’s ancient ignorance with its patient and persistent questions. Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity… tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.
Science meant
looking
— a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.
Unafraid, Guilford sat on the crumbling back steps while the others went inside to huddle in the parlor. For a moment he was happily alone, warm enough in his new sweater, the steam of his breath twining up into the breathless radiance of the sky.

 

Later — in the months, the years, the century of aftermath — countless analogies would be drawn. The Flood, Armageddon, the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the event itself, the terrible knowledge of it and the diffusion of that knowledge across what remained of the human world, lacked parallel or precedent.
In 1877 the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had mapped the canals of Mars. For decades afterward his maps were duplicated and refined and accepted as fact, until better lenses proved the canals were an illusion, unless Mars itself had changed since then: hardly unthinkable, in light of what happened to the Earth. Perhaps something had twined through the solar system like a thread borne on a breath of air, something ephemeral but unthinkably immense, touching the cold worlds of the outer solar system, moving through rock, ice, frozen mantle, lifeless geologies. Changing what it touched. Moving toward the Earth.
The sky had been full of signs and omens. In 1907, the Tunguska fireball. In 1910, Halley’s Comet. Some, like Guilford Law’s mother, thought it was the end of the world. Even then.
The sky that March night was brighter over the northeastern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean than it had been during the Comet’s visit. For hours, the horizon flared with blue and violet light. The light, witnesses said, was like a wall. It fell from the zenith. It divided the waters. It was visible from Khartoum (but in the northern sky) and from Tokyo (faintly, to the west).
From Berlin, Paris, London, all the capitals of Europe, the rippling light enclosed the entire span of the sky. Hundreds of thousands of spectators gathered in the streets, sleepless under the cold efflorescence. Reports flooded into New York until fourteen minutes before midnight.
At 11:46 Eastern Time, the transatlantic cable fell suddenly and inexplicably silent.

 

It was the era of the fabulous ships, the Great White Fleet, the Cunard and White Star liners, the
Teutonic
, the
Mauretania
, monstrosities of empire.
It was also the dawn of the age of the Marconi wireless. The silence of the Atlantic cable might have been explained by any number of simple catastrophes. The silence of the European land stations was far more ominous.
Radio operators flashed messages and queries across the cold, placid North Atlantic. There was no CQD or the new distress signal, SOS, none of the drama of a foundering ship, but certain vessels were mysteriously unresponsive, including White Star’s
Olympic
and Hamburg-American’s
Kronprinzzessin Cecilie
— flagship vessels on which, moments before, the wealthy of a dozen nations had crowded frost-rimmed rails to see the phenomenon that cast such a gaudy reflection over the winter-dark and glassy surface of the sea.
The spectacular and unexplained celestial lights vanished abruptly before dawn, scything away from the horizon like a burning blade. The sun rose into turbulent skies over most of the Great Circle route. The sea was restless, winds gusty and at times violent as the day wore on. Beyond roughly 15° west of the Prime Meridian and 40° north of the equator, the silence remained absolute and unbroken.

 

First to cross the boundary of what the New York wire services had already begun to call “the Wall of Mystery” was the aging White Star liner
Oregon
, out of New York and bound for Queenstown and Liverpool.
Her American captain, Truxton Davies, felt the urgency of the situation although he understood it no better than anyone else. He distrusted the Marconi system. The
Oregon
’s own radio rig was a cumbersome sparker, its range barely a hundred miles. Messages could be garbled, rumors of disaster were often exaggerated. But he had been in San Francisco in 1906, had fled along Market Street barely ahead of the flames, and he knew too well what sort of mischief nature could make, given a chance.
He had slept through the events of the night before. Let the passengers lose sleep gawking at the sky; he preferred the homely comfort of his bunk. Roused before dawn by a nervous radio operator, Davies reviewed the Marconi traffic, then ordered his Chief Engineer to stoke the boilers and his Chief Steward to boil coffee for all hands. His concern was tentative, his attitude still skeptical. Both the
Olympic
and the
Kronprinzzessen Cecilie
had been only hours east of the
Oregon
. If there was an authentic CQD he would have the First Officer rig the ship for rescue; until then… well, they would keep alert.
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.

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