Darwinia

Dinner was a freshly killed moth-hawk, cleaned and charred, plus strips of snake pemmican from Tom Compton’s pack. The frontiersman improvised a lean-to out of sage-pine branches and loose furs. He had salvaged a number of furs, one pistol, and the three pack animals from the most recent attack. All that remained of the Finch Expedition.

Guilford ate sparingly. He wanted desperately to sleep — to sleep off chronic malnutrition, sleep off three days of hypothermia in the well, the shock of Sullivan’s death, the frostbite that had turned his toes and fingertips an ominous china white. But that wasn’t going to happen. And right now he needed to know exactly how bad the situation had become.

He asked the frontiersman how the others had died.

“It was all over by the time I got back,” Tom said. “Judging by their tracks, the attackers came from the north. Armed men, ten or fifteen, maybe spotted Diggs’s kitchen fire, maybe just got lucky. They must have come in shooting. Everybody dead but Finch, who hid out in the stables. The bandits left our snakes behind — they had snakes of their own. Left one of their own men, too, leg-shot, couldn’t walk.”

“Partisans?” Guilford asked.

The Frontiersman shook his head. “Not the one they left behind, anyhow.”

“You talked to him?”

“Had a word with him. He wasn’t going anywhere. Both legs fucked up beyond repair, plus I introduced him to my knife when he got truculent.”

“Jesus, Tom!”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t see what they did to Diggs and Farr and Robertson and Donner. These people aren’t human.”

Finch looked up abruptly, hollow-eyed, startled.

Guilford said, “Go on.”

“It was obvious from his accent this shitheel was no Partisan. Hell, I’ve drunk with Partisans. They’re mostly repatriate Frenchmen or Italians who like to get tight and fly their flag and take a few shots at American colonists. The big-time Partisans are pirates, armed merchantmen, they’ll bag some creaky old frigate and steal the cargo and call it import duties and spend the money in a backwater whorehouse. Travel up the Rhine, the only Partisans you meet are wildcat miners with political opinions.

“This guy was an American. Said he was recruited in Jeffersonville and that his people came into the hinterland bounty-hunting the Finch expedition. Said they were paid good money.”

“Did he say who paid ’em?”

“Not before he passed out, no. And I didn’t have a second chance to ask him. I had Finch to worry about, and you and Sullivan back at the well. Figured I’d sling the son of a bitch on a sledge and drag him along by daylight.” The frontiersman paused. “But he escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“I left him alone just long enough to harness the snakes. Well, not alone, precisely — Finch was with him, for all the difference that makes. When I got back, he was gone. Ran off.”

“You said he passed out. You said his legs were shot up.”

“He did, and his legs were bloody meat, a couple of bones obviously broken. Not the kind of wound you can fake. But when I came back he was gone. Left footprints. When I say he ran, I mean he ran. Ran like a jackrabbit, headed off into the ruins. I suppose I could have tracked him but there was too much else to do.”

“On the surface of it,” Guilford said carefully, “that’s impossible.”

“On the surface of it it’s bullshit, but all I know is what I see.”

“You say Finch was with him?”

Tom’s frown deepened, an angle of discontent in the frost-rimed cavern of his beard. “Finch was with him, but he hasn’t had a word to say on the subject.”

Guilford turned to the geologist. Every indignity the expedition had suffered since Gillvany’s death was written on Finch’s face, plus the special humiliation of a man who has lost command — who has lost lives for which he was nominally responsible. There was nothing pompous about Finch any longer, no dignity in his fixed stare, only defeat.

“Dr. Finch?”

The geologist looked at Guilford briefly. His attention flickered like a candle.

“Dr. Finch, did you see what happened to the man Tom talked to? The injured man?”

Finch turned his head away.

“Don’t bother,” Tom said. “He’s mute as a stick.”

“Dr. Finch, it might help us if we knew what happened. Help us get home safe, I mean.”

“It was a miracle,” Preston Finch said.

His voice was a sandpapered croak. The frontiersman gave him an astonished stare.

Guilford persisted gently. “Dr. Finch? What is it you saw, exactly?”

“His wounds healed. The flesh knitted itself together. The bones mended themselves. He stood up. He looked at me. He laughed.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“That’s a big help,” Tom Compton said.

The frontiersman sat watch. Guilford crawled into the lean-to with Finch. The botanist stank of stale sweat and snake hides and hopelessness, but Guilford didn’t smell much sweeter himself. Their human effluvia filled the narrow space, and their breath condensed to ice in the frigid air.