Darwinia

I’ve grown closer to Sullivan, perhaps because our parallel injuries (my leg, his hip) kept us confined together for some weeks. Often we’re left alone with Diggs or Preston Finch. Finch remains nearly wordless, though he helps with the physical labor. Sullivan, by contrast, talks to me freely, and I almost as freely to him. You might be wary of his atheism, Caroline, but it’s a principled atheism, if that makes any sense.

Last night we were assigned the late watch, a plush duty if you don’t mind the hours. We kept the fire burning and swapped stories, as usual, until we heard a commotion from the stables, as we call the semi-collapsed structure where the animals are kept. So we donned our furs and limped into the frigid night to investigate.

Snow had been falling all afternoon, and Sullivan’s torch cast a flickering glow across a boulevard of unsullied white. With its broken stones and fractured walls cloaked in snow the City seems only temporarily vacated. The buildings are identical, though in various stages of decay, and identically made, of huge bricks cut from raw granite and set in place without benefit of mortar. The bricks or blocks are perfectly square, about ten feet on a side. The buildings themselves are identically square and arranged in squares of four, as if by a meticulous but unimaginative child.

The doorways may once have possessed wooden doors, but if they ever existed they have long since rotted and weathered away. The openings are about twice as high as a man’s head and several times wider than his girth, but this, Sullivan points out, tells us virtually nothing of the original inhabitants — the doors of cathedrals are larger than the doors of sod huts, but the men who pass through them are the same. Nevertheless, the impression lingers of some squat, gigantic race, antediluvian, pre-Adamic.

We had put up a crude mosquewood fence to keep our twelve captive snakes corralled in their ruin. Usually they’re fairly quiet, barring the usual belching and mewling. Tonight the noise was nearly continuous, a collective moan, and we tracked it under the half-fallen stone eaves, where one of our herd was giving birth.

Or rather (we saw as we came closer) it was laying eggs. The eggs emerged from the beast’s pendulous abdomen in glittering clusters, each egg about the size of a softball, until a gelatinous mass of them lay steaming in a mound of windblown snow.

I looked at Sullivan. “The eggs will freeze in this weather. If we build a fire—”

Sullivan shook his head. “Nature must have made a provision,” he whispered. “If not, we’re too ignorant to help. Stand back, Guilford. Give them room.”

And he was right. Nature had made a provision, if an awkward one. When the female finished dropping her eggs a second animal, perhaps the male parent, approached the pearlescent mass and in a singular motion of its six limbs managed to scoop the eggs from the snow into pouches arrayed along its belly… there, presumably, to incubate until the hatchlings could survive on their own.

The moaning and barking finally relented, and the herd went back about its business.

We fled to the warmth of our own shelter. We had taken over two immense rooms in one of the less exposed buildings, partitioned and sealed them from the weather with snakeskins and made an insulating floor of dried rushes. The effect was cheerful, if only by comparison with the frigid outer dark.

Sullivan grew thoughtful, warming his hands, putting a kettle of snow at the edge of the fire for root tea. “They’re born,” he said, “they reproduce, they die… Guilford, if they didn’t evolve, it’s inevitable that they will evolve — selected by nature, bred by circumstance…”

“The handiwork of God, Finch would say.” Since Finch was perpetually silent, I felt obliged to take his part, if only to keep Sullivan interested.

“But what does that mean?” Sullivan stood up, nearly toppling the kettle. “How I would love to have an explanation so wonderfully complete! And I don’t mean that sarcastically, Guilford; don’t give me your sorrowful stare. I’m serious. To look at the color of Mars in the night sky, at six-legged fur-bearing snakes laying eggs in the snow, and see nothing but the hand of God… how sweetly simple!”

“Truth is simple,” I said, smarting.

“Truth is often simple. Deceptively simple. But I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”

Which is what I mean, Caroline, by “principled atheism.” Sullivan is an honest man and humble about his learning. He comes from a Quaker family and will even, when he’s tired, slip into the Quaker habit of tongue. I tell thee, Guilford…

“This city,” he brooded. “This thing we call a city, though notice, it’s nothing but boxes and alleys… no plumbing, no provision for the storage of food; no ovens, no granaries, no temples, no playing fields… this city is a key.”

To what? I wanted to ask.