Darwinia (14 page)

We all know each other very well by now — all our quirks idiosyncrasies, which are legion — and I have even had several rewarding conversations with Tom Compton, who has shown me more respect since the near wreck of the
Perspicacity
. In his eyes I am still the pampered Easterner who makes a soft living with a photo-box (as he calls it), but I have shown enough initiative to impress him.

We have waited a week already for Erasmus and will wait at least another. Fortunately I have the copy of
Argosy
for which I traded Finch’s geology tome. The magazine contains an installment of E. R. Burroughs’
Lost Kingdom of Darwinia
, more of his imagined “ancient hinterland” complete with dinosaurs, noble savages, and a colony of evil-minded Junkers to rule them. A princess requires rescue. I know your disdain for this type of fiction, Caroline, and I have to admit that even Burroughs’ wild Darwinia pales against close contact with the real thing: these too-solid hills and shadowy, cool forests. But the magazine is a delightful distraction I am much envied by the other Expeditionaries, since I have been chary about loaning the volume.

Erasmus arrived with the pack animals and accepted payment in the form of a check drawn on a Jeffersonville bank. He spent an evening in camp and expressed his condolences, though not his surprise, regarding Gillvany’s death.

But his arrival was overshadowed by Avery Keck’s discovery. Keck and Tom Compton had gone on another snake hunt, Keck observing both the local geography and the frontiersman’s tracking skills. Not that the snakes required much tracking, as Keck explained over the campfire. They had simply cut off one snake from the herd and taken it down with a single shot from Tom Compton’s rifle. Dragging the carcass back to camp was the difficult part.

More interesting, Keck said, was that they had come across an insect nest and its midden.

The insects, Keck said, were ten-legged invertebrate carnivores, distantly related to the stump runners Guilford had encountered outside London. They tunneled in boggy lowland areas where the soil was loose and wet. A fur snake or any other animal wandering into the insects’ territory would be repeatedly bitten by the colony’s venomous drones, then swarmed and stripped of its meat. Cleaned bones were meticulously shuttled to the colony’s rim — the famous midden.

“The older a colony, the bigger its midden,” Keck said. “I saw one nest in the Rhinish lowlands that had grown like a fairy ring, about a hundred meters across. The one Tom and I found is about average, in my experience. A perfect circle of pitted white bones. Mainly the bones of unlucky fur snakes, but—” Keck unwrapped the oilcloth package he had carried back to camp. “We found this.”

It was a long, high-domed, spike-toothed skull. It was white as polished ivory, but it glittered redly in the firelight.

“Well, shit!” Diggs exclaimed, which earned him a stiff look from Preston Finch.

Guilford turned to Sullivan, who nodded. “Similar to the skull we saw in London.” He explained the Museum of Monstrosities. “Interesting. It looks to me like a large predator, and it must have been widely distributed, at least at one time.”

“At one time?” Finch asked scornfully. “Do you mean 1913? Or 1915?”

Sullivan ignored him. “How old would you judge this specimen to be, Mr. Keck?”

“Couldn’t venture a guess. Obviously it’s neither fossilized nor weathered, so — relatively recent.”

“Which means we might run into one of these beasties on the hoof,” Ed Betts put in. “Keep your pistols loaded.”

Tom Compton had never seen a living sample of the creature, however, in all his wilderness experience, nor had the snake trader Erasmus — “Though people
do
disappear in the bush.”

“Resembles a bear,” Diggs said. “California grizzly, if that’s an adult specimen. Might be drawn to garbage and such. How about we police the camp a little more scientifically from now on?”

“Maybe they avoid people,” Sullivan said. “Maybe we frighten them.”

“Maybe,” Tom said. “But that jaw could swallow a man’s leg up to the knee and probably snap it at the joint. If we frighten them, it ought to be mutual.”

“We’ll double the night watch,” Finch decided.

Even Eden had its serpent, Guilford thought.

Come morning they set out across the gently rolling meadowland, southward toward the mountains. The fur snakes made passable riding animals — they didn’t mind bearing human cargo and would even respond to direction from a crude bridle — but their bodies were simply too wide to straddle comfortably (not to mention greasy and evil-smelling), and no one had yet invented a functional snake saddle. Guilford preferred to walk, even after the second day, when the march seemed infinitely more grueling, when calves and ankles and thighs made their most concerted protests.

The meadowed hills rolled steadily higher. Fresh water was harder to find now, though the snakes could sense a creek or pool from a mile’s distance. And the mountains on the horizon, subject of Keck’s relentless triangulation, were clearly a barrier: the end of the road, even if Finch and company found an accessible pass where Brenner or Mount Genevre had been.
Then we turn around
, Guilford thought,
and take our pressed plants and punctured bugs back to America, and people will say we helped “tame” the continent, though that’s a joke: we’re a very small pinprick of knowledge on the skin of this unknown country.

But he was proud of what they had accomplished. We walked, he told the frontiersman, where no one else had walked, puzzled out at least a few of Darwinia’s secrets.

“We haven’t fucked the continent,” Tom Compton agreed, “but I guess we’ve lifted her skirts.”

Guilford trudged through the cool afternoon with Compton and Sullivan and their pack animals. Low clouds drifted across the sky, blindingly white at the margins, woolly gray beneath. His boots left brief imprints in the spongy meadow growth. Down a western slope of land Keck had spotted another insect midden, a ring of bone around a deceptively peaceful patch of green, like a troll’s garden, Guilford thought. They gave it a wide berth.

Tom Compton brooded on another matter. “There have been campfires behind us the last couple of nights,” he said. “Five, six miles back. I don’t know what that means.”

“Partisans?” Sullivan asked.

“Probably just hunters, maybe followed us up past the Rheinfelden — followed Erasmus, more likely, poaching on his territory. The Partisans, they’re mostly coast pirates out of the rogue settlements. They don’t come inland as a rule, unless they’re hunting or prospecting, which makes them less likely to practice politics at gunpoint.”

“Still,” Sullivan said, “I liked it better when we were alone.”

“So did I,” the frontiersman said.

Tom Compton was standing watch at dawn, when the Partisans attacked.

He sat at the embers of a fire with Ed Betts, a rotund man whose chin kept drifting toward his chest. Betts didn’t know how to keep himself awake. Tom did. The frontiersman had stood these watches before, usually alone, wary of robbers or claim jumpers, especially when he hunted the coal country. It was a trick of the mind, to put away sleep until later. It was a skill. Betts didn’t have it.

Still, there was no warning when the first shots came from the dim woods to the east. There was barely enough light to turn the sky an India-ink blue. Four or five rifles barked in rough unison. “What the hell,” Betts said, then slumped forward with a hole in his neck, dousing the fire with blood.

The frontiersman rolled into the dirt. He fired his own rifle at the margin of the woods, more to wake the camp than defend it. He couldn’t see the enemy.

The fur snakes squealed their fear and then began to die in a second volley of bullets.

Guilford was asleep when the attack began — dreaming again of the Army picket, his twin in khaki, who was trying to deliver some vital but unintelligible message.

Yesterday’s march had been exhausting. The expedition had followed a series of lightly wooded ridgetops and ravines, prodding the reluctant fur snakes under the arches of the mosque trees, climbing and descending. The snakes disliked the close confinement of the woods and expressed their discontent by mewling, belching, and farting. The stink was cloying in the still air and was not abated by a steady drizzle, which only added the sour-milk stench of wet fur to the mix.

Eventually the land leveled. These high alpine meadows had blossomed in the rain, the false clover opening white star petals like summer snowflakes. Pitching tents in the drizzle was a tedious chore, and dinner came out of a can. Finch kept a lantern burning in his tent after dark — scribbling his theories, Guilford supposed, reconciling the day’s events with the dialectic of the New Creation — but everyone else simply collapsed into bedrolls and silence.

The eastern horizon was faintly blue when the first shots were fired. Guilford came awake to the sound of cries and percussion. He fumbled for his pistol, heart hammering. He had been carrying the pistol fully loaded since Keck recovered the monster skull, but he wasn’t a marksman. He knew how to fire the pistol but had never killed anything with it.

He rolled out of his tent into chaos.

The attack had come from the tree line to the east, a black silhouette against the dawn. Keck, Sullivan, Diggs, and Tom Compton had set up a sort of skirmish line behind the heaped bodies of three dead fur snakes. They were firing into the woods sporadically, starved for targets. The remaining fur snakes shrieked and yanked at their tethers in futile panic. One of the animals fell as Guilford watched.

The rest of the expeditionaries were tumbling out of their tents in terrified confusion. Ed Betts lay dead beside the campfire, his shirt scarlet with blood. Chuck Hemphill and Ray Burke were on their hands and knees, shouting, “Get down! Keep your heads down!”

Guilford crawled through the circle of tattered canvas to join Sullivan and company. They didn’t acknowledge his presence until he had ducked up and fired a pistol shot into the dark of the woods. Tom Compton put a hand on his arm. “You can’t shoot what you can’t see. And we’re outnumbered.”

“How can you tell?”

“See the muzzle flash.”

A fresh volley of bullets answered Guilford’s single shot. The snake carcasses shook with thudding impacts.

“Christ!” Diggs said. “What do we do?”

Guilford glanced back at the tents. Preston Finch had just emerged, hatless and bootless, adjusting his bottle-glass lenses and firing his ivoried pistol into the air.

“We run,” Tom Compton said.

“Our food,” Sullivan said, “the specimens, the samples—”

The close whine of a bullet interrupted him.

“Fuck all that!” Diggs said.

“Get the attention of the others,” Tom said. “Follow me.”

The Partisans — if they
were
Partisans — had encircled the camp, but they were sparse on the unwooded western slope of the hill and easier to shoot. Guilford counted at least two enemy dead, though Chuck Hemphill and Emil Swensen were killed and Sullivan winged, a bloody puncture in the meat of his arm. The rest followed Tom Compton into the mist of the ravine where the sunlight had not begun to penetrate. It was a slow and agonizing route, with only the frontiersman’s shouted commands to keep the expeditionaries in any sort of order. Guilford could not seem to draw breath enough to satisfy his body; the air burned in his lungs. Shadows and fog made uneasy cover, and he heard, or imagined he heard, the sound of pursuit only paces behind him. And where was there to run? A glacial creek bisected this valley; the ridge wall beyond it was rocky and steep.