Darwinia

For a split second she thought he was going to confide in her. The look that crossed his face was of such purified human loneliness that Karen felt her lower lip begin to tremble.

What he said was, “You’re a very pretty girl.”

“That’s the first time in fifteen years anybody’s called me a girl, Mr. Law.”

“It’s going to be a hard autumn.”

“Is it?”

“You might not see me for a while. Tell you what. If I’m back by spring, I might look you up. If that’s all right, I mean.”

“Okay with me, I suppose. Spring’s a long time off.”

“And if I don’t make it back—”

Back from where? She waited for him to finish.

But he swallowed his drink and shook his head.

Pretty girl, he had said.

She got a dozen spurious compliments a day from men who were drunk or indifferently particular. Compliments meant nothing. But what Guilford Law had said stayed with her through the evening. So simple, she thought. And sad, and curious.

Maybe he would look her up… and maybe that would be all right with her.

But tonight he finished his drink and went home alone, moving like a wounded animal. She challenged him with her eyes. He looked away.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lily left work at four-thirty and rode a bus to the National Museum.

The day was cool, clear, brisk. The bus was crowded with grim wage earners, middle-aged men in worsted suits and crumpled hats. None of them understood the imminence of celestial war. What they wanted, in her experience, was a cocktail, dinner, an after-dinner cocktail, the kids asleep, television tuned to one of the two national networks, and maybe a nightcap before bed.

She envied them.

There was a theme exhibit at the Museum, advertised on immense banners like baronial flags suspended above the doors.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

Understanding a Miracle

“Miracle,” she supposed, to appease the religious lobbies. She still preferred to think of the continent as Darwinia, the old Hearst nickname. The irony was lost now; most people acknowledged that Europe had a fossil history of its own, whatever that might mean, and she could well imagine the young Charles Darwin collecting beetles in the Rhine marshes, puzzling out the continent’s mystery. Though perhaps not its central mystery.

Off the bus, through cool air into the fluorescent inner chambers of the museum.

The exhibit was immense. Abby ignored the majority of it and walked directly to the glass case devoted to the Finch Expedition of 1920 and the brief Anglo-American conflict. Here were examples of old-time compasses, plant-presses, theodolites, a crude memorial retrieved years after the event from the Rhinelands below the Bodensee: In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany. Photographs of the members of the expedition: Preston Finch, ridiculously stiff in a solar topee; gaunt Avery Keck; luckless Gillvany; poor martyred John Watts Sullivan… Diggs, the cook, wasn’t represented, nor was Tom Compton, but here was her father, Guilford Law, with a day’s beard and a flannel shirt, from his earlier Gallatin River expedition, a frowning young man with a box camera and dirty fingernails.

She touched the glass case with the tip of a finger. She hadn’t seen her father for twenty years, not since that dreadful morning in Fayetteville, the sun rising, it had seemed to her, on an ocean of blood.

He hadn’t died. Grave as his wounds were, they healed rapidly. He had been held in the Oro Delta County Hospital under surveillance: the Territorial Police wanted him to explain the gunshot deaths of Abby, Nicholas, three anonymous out-of-towners, and Sheriff Carlyle. But he was ambulatory long before the doctors anticipated; he left the hospital during the midnight shift after overpowering a guard. A warrant was issued, but that was hardly more than a gesture. The continent swallowed fugitives whole.

He was still out there.

She knew he was. The Old Men contacted her from time to time. Periodically, she told them what she learned from her secretarial job in the office of Matthew Crane — a demon-ridden Department of Defense functionary — and they reassured her that her father was still alive.

Still out there, unmaking the Apocalypse.

The time, they insisted, was close at hand.

Lily paused before an illuminated diorama.

Here was a Darwinian fossil biped — she couldn’t remember or pronounce its Latin name — a two-legged and four-armed monster that had hunted the European plains as recently as the Ice Age, and a formidable beast it was. The skeleton in the diorama stood eight feet tall, with a massive ventral spine to which dense bands of muscle had once been attached, a domed skull, a jaw full of flint-sharp teeth. And here beside it a reconstruction, complete with chitinous skin, glass eyes, serrated claws long as kitchen knives, tearing the throat of a fur snake.

A museum exhibit, like the photograph of Guilford Law; but Lily knew neither her father nor the beast was truly extinct.