He slept fitfully in his hammock and woke up feverish. When he stood he was unsteady on his feet — the deck plates danced a waltz — and the smell of the galley made him turn away from breakfast. By noon he was ill enough to summon the expedition’s doctor, Wilson Farr, who diagnosed the Continental Fever.
“Will I die?” Guilford asked.
“You might knock on that door,” Farr said, squinting through eyeglass lenses not much larger than cigar bands, “but I doubt you’ll be admitted.”
Sullivan came to see him during the evening, as the fever continued to rise and a rosy erythema covered Guilford’s arms and legs. He found it difficult to bring Sullivan into focus and their talk drifted like a rudderless ship, the older man attempting to distract him with theories about Darwinian life, the physical structure of its common invertebrates. Finally Sullivan said, “I’m sure you’re tired—” He was: unspeakably tired. “But I’ll leave you with a last thought, Mr. Law. How is it, d’you suppose, that a purely Darwinian disease, a miraculous microbe, can live and multiply in the body of ordinary mortals like ourselves? Doesn’t that seem more than coincidental?”
“Can’t say,” Guilford muttered, and turned his face to the wall.
At the height of his illness he dreamed he was a soldier pacing the margin of some airless, dusty battlefield: a picket among the dead, waiting for an unseen enemy, occasionally kneeling to drink from pools of tepid water in which his own reflection gazed back at him, his mirror-self unspeakably ancient and full of weary secrets.
The dream submerged into a long void punctuated by lightning-flashes of nausea, but by Monday he was on the mend, his fever broken, well enough to take solid food and chafe at his confinement belowdecks as the Weston moved deeper inland. Farr brought him a current edition of Finch’s Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy, and Guilford was able to lose himself for a time in the several ages of the Earth, the Great Flood that had left its mark in cataclysmic reformations of the mantle, for example the Grand Canyon — unless, as Finch allowed, these features were “prior creations, endowed by their Author with the appearance of great age.”
Creation modified by a worldwide flood, which had deposited fossil animals at various altitudes or buried them in mud and silt, as Eden itself must have been buried. Guilford had studied much of it before, though Finch buttressed his argument with a wealth of detaiclass="underline" the one hundred classifications of drift and diluvium; geological wheels in which extinct beasts were depicted in neat, separate categories. But that single phrase (“the appearance of age”) troubled him. It made all knowledge provisional. The world was a stage set — it might have been built yesterday, freshly equipped with mountains and mastodon bones and human memories — which gave the Creator an unseemly interest in deceiving his human creations and made no useful distinction between the work of time and the work of a miracle. It seemed to Guilford unnecessarily complex — though why, come to think of it, should the world be simple? More shocking, perhaps, if one could render the universe and all its stars and planets in a single equation (as the European mathematician Einstein was said to have tried to do).
Finch would say that was why God had given humanity the Scriptures, to make sense of a bewildering world. And Guilford had to admire the weight and poetry, the convolute logic of Finch’s work. He wasn’t geologist enough to argue with it… though he did come away with the impression of a lofty cathedral erected on a few creaking two-by-fours.
And Sullivan’s question nagged. How had Guilford caught a Darwinian bug, if the new continent was truly a separate creation? For that matter, how was it that men could digest certain Darwinian plants and animals? Some were poisonous — far too many — but some were nourishing, even delectable. Didn’t that imply a hidden similarity, a common, if distant, origin?
Well, a common Creator, at least. Common ancestry, Sullivan had implied. But what was impossible on the face of it. Darwinia had existed for hardly more than a decade… or might have existed much longer, but not in any form sensible to the Earth.
That was the paradox of the New Europe. Look for miracles, find history; look for history, run headlong into the blunt edge of a miracle.
Rain chased the expedition for a day and a half, the lowlands glittering under a fine silver mist. The Rhine undulated through wild forests, Darwinian forests of a particularly deep and mossy green, finally passed into a gentle plain carpeted with a broad-leafed plant Tom Compton called fingerwort. The fingerwort had begun to bloom, tiny golden blossoms giving the meadows the glow of a premature autumn. It was an inviting view, by Darwinian standards, but if you walked in the fingerwort, the frontiersman said, you wore boots to your knees or risked a case of hives caused by the plants’ astringent yellow sap. Hovering insects called nettleflies swarmed the fields by day, but despite their thorny appearance they didn’t bite human flesh and would even perch on a fingertip, their translucent bodies finely filigreed, like miniature Christmas ornaments.
The Weston anchored in mid-river. Guilford, newly mended though still somewhat weak, went ashore to help Sullivan collect fingerwort and a dozen other meadow species. The voucher specimens were prepared between the frames of Sullivan’s plant-press, the dried flats layered into a box wrapped in oilcloth. Sullivan showed him a particularly vivid orange flower common along the sandy shore. “For all its structure, it might be cousin to an English poppy. But these flowers are male, Mr. Law. Insects disperse pollen by literally devouring the stamens. The female flower — here’s one: you see? — is hardly a flower at all in the conventional sense. More like a thread dipped in honey. One immense pistil, with a Ciliate structure to carry the male pollen to the gynoecium. Insects are often trapped on it, and pollen with them. The pattern is common in Darwinia, non-existent among terrestrial plants. The physical resemblance is real but coincidental. As if the same process of evolution had acted through different channels — like this river, which approximates the Rhine in general but not in the specific. It drains roughly the same highlands to roughly the same ocean, but its elbows and meanders are entirely unpredictable.”
And its whirlpools, Guilford thought, and its rapids, though the river had been gentle enough so far. Did the river of evolution pose similar hazards?
Sullivan, Gillvany, Finch and Robinson ruled the daylight hours — Digby, the expedition’s cook, called them “Plants and Ants, Stones and Bones.” Night belonged to Keck, Tuckinan and Burke, surveyors and navigators, with their sextants and stars and maps by lamplight. Guilford enjoyed asking Keck exactly where the expedition was, because his answers were inevitably strange and wonderful. “We’re entering the Cologne Embayment, Mr. Law, and we’d be seeing Düsseldorf before long, if the world hadn’t been turned on its head.”
Weston anchored in a broad, slow turn of the river T. Compton calls Cathedral Pool. Rhine flows from a gentle rift valley, mountainous Bergischland east of us, the Rhine Gorge somewhere ahead. Generously forested terrain: mosque trees (taller than English spp.), immense khaki-colored sage-pine, complex undergrowth. Fire perhaps a threat in dry weather. This was brown coal territory in the other Europe; Compton says wildcatters have been spotted here shallow mines already operating (marginally), and we have seen crude roads a little river traffic. Finch claims to find evidence of coking coal, says this area will be an iron and steel center someday, God willing, with pig iron from the Oolitic scarps of the Cotes de Moselle, esp. if U.S. keeps continent from being “fenced with borders.”