Darwinia

“Appearances are deceptive. Have you ever seen an African termite hill? It’s an elaborate structure, often taller than a man. But the only architect is evolution itself. Or think of the regularity and complexity of a honeycomb.”

“You’re saying we might be inside some kind of insect hive?”

“What I’m saying is that although these structures are obviously artificial, the uniformity of size and presumably of function argues against a human builder.”

“What kind of insect carves granite blocks the size of the Washington Monument?”

“I can’t imagine. Worse, it’s unprecedented. No one has reported anything like it. Whoever or whatever built this city, they seem to have left no progeny and had no obvious antecedents. It’s almost a separate creation.”

This mirrored my own thoughts too closely. For all its strangeness, Darwinia possesses its own beauty — moss-green meadows, sage-pine glades, gentle rivers. The ruins have none of that charm. For endless hours we traveled the city’s relentlessly regular streets, sun angling low behind monoliths of cracked stone. The snow ahead of us was trackless and blank. Neither Sullivan nor I thought twice about that until Tom pointed out the peculiarity of it. In the four or five days since the last snowfall no animal had left its track here, nor any flying things, not even moth-hawks. Moth-hawks are common in these parts; whole flocks of them roost in the ruined structures at the rim of the city. (Easy game, if you’re desperate enough to want to eat the things. You sneak up on a roosting flock at night, with a torch; the light dazzles them; a man can kill six or seven with a stick before they gather their wits and fly away.) But not here. Granted, there’s little enough forage deep in these stone-choked warrens. Still, the absence of life seems ominous. It heightens the nerves, Caroline, and I admit that as the afternoon passed and the shadows lengthened we were all three of us on our toes, apt to start at the slightest commotion.

Not that there was any commotion. Only the crackle of hidden ice, the soft collapse of sun-softened snow. With dusk we made our camp, undisturbed. It speaks to the size of this place that we have still not reached what Sullivan calculates to be the center of the city. We carried kindling with us, mosque-tree branches, dense but hollow and not especially heavy; we used them to make a fire in one of the structures with a more or less intact roof. We couldn’t hope to heat the cathedral-sized interior, but we were out of the wind and able to make a cozy-enough corner for ourselves.

In any case it is warmer here than at the perimeter. Sullivan points out that the stone floor is warmer than he can account for, almost warm enough to melt ice, perhaps due to an underground spring or other source of natural heat. Tom Compton overcame his wary silence long enough to tell us that, one clear night when he camped in the hills after a snake hunt, he had seen a blue-green fairy glow shining deep within the city. Some kind of vulcanism, maybe, though Sullivan says the geology is wrong. We’ve seen no sign of it ourselves.

I should add that Tom Compton, ordinarily the staunchest of pragmatists, seems more unnerved than either Sullivan or I. He said a peculiar thing tonight as I began this entry… mumbled it, leaning into the fire so intently that I worried an ember would ignite his briar-patch beard.

“I dreamed of this place,” he said.

He wouldn’t elaborate, but I felt a chill despite the fire. Because, Caroline, I’ve dreamed of this place too, dreamed of it deep in the fever sleeps of autumn, when the poison was still coursing through my body and I couldn’t tell day from night… I dreamed of the city too, and I don’t know what that means.

… and dreamed again last night.

But I have more than that to tell you, Caroline, and not much time. Our supplies are limited and Sullivan insists we use each moment as economically as possible. So I will tell you in the plainest and most direct words what we found.

The city isn’t just a grid of squares. It has a center, as Sullivan suspected. And at the center is not a cathedral or a marketplace but something altogether stranger.

We came upon the building this morning. It must once have been visible from a great distance, but erosion has camouflaged it. (I doubt even Finch would deny that these ruins are terribly old.) Today the structure is surrounded by a field of its own rubble. Huge stone blocks, some polished as if fresh from the quarry, others worn into a grotesquery of angles, impeded our progress. We left our sledge behind and hiked through the maze-like passages created by chance and weather until we found the core of the central building.