Galapagos Regained (53 page)

Shortly after the Indians unloaded the prodigious creature, releasing her in the same Mount Pajas lava field where the saddlebacks roamed, three of Eggwort's wives appeared before Chloe and Léourier.

“Lady Omega, we're hankerin' to have a talk with you,” said Rebecca. “You should know where us sultanas stand in the matter of the forthcomin' trial. Even if you're a false prophet like Orrin believes—”

“Somethin' we got no way of knowin',” said the pregnant Naomi.

Rebecca continued, “And even if the sunken ark was the genuine and boney fide article—”

“Somethin' else we got no way of knowin',” said Sarah.

“Well, despite all that, we don't think your friends deserve to hang,” said Rebecca. “The upshot is that we're placin' ourselves at your disposal.”

Though perplexed by the sultanas' offering, Chloe could sense no ulterior motives therein, and so she shook the hands of her new factotums and said, “Lady Omega gratefully accepts your assistance, Mrs. Eggwort—and Mrs. Eggwort and Mrs. Eggwort.”

“Just tell us what needs doin',” said Rebecca.

“Beyond tortoises, my expert testimony will incorporate several varieties of lizard and bird,” said Chloe. “May I depend on you to mind them? Zookeeping is an honorable trade—I once practiced it myself.”

“We'll tend your exhibits as faithfully as a sheepdog guardin' the fold,” said Sarah.

“I can't imagine Monsieur Eggwort sanctioning this turn of events,” said Léourier.

“We'll tell him Miss Omega's testimony can never reach a pinnacle of outlandishness without she's got a passel of live critters at her fingertips,” said Rebecca.

“And if he don't buy that argument,” said Naomi, “we'll tell him his remainin' days as a priapically happy emperor are fewer than he imagines.”

The following afternoon the tortoise team loaded a slopeback male from Indefatigable into the airship's gondola. Being lighter than his dome-shelled cousin, the creature proved easier to convey across the channel, but Chloe still felt a sense of accomplishment when the
Lamarck
landed on Charles.

Having struck the tortoises off her list, she turned her attention to the lizards. It took her and Léourier a full day to supplement Duntopia's indigenous red marine iguanas with two small blacks from Tower Isle and two multicoloreds from Narborough. Collecting the terrestrials—a short-spined specimen from Hood and a high-spined specimen from Barrington—also consumed Chloe's energies from dawn to dusk. Rebecca ingeniously provided each creature with a calico neckband on which she'd embroidered the name of its native isle. The collars gave the lizards a clerical appearance, as if they'd been called by their Creator to save the souls of fellow reptiles.

“Orrin now knows we're in your employ,” Rebecca informed Chloe.

“I assume he wasn't overjoyed.”

“Never seen him so riled,” said Naomi with a tilted smile.

“But when he realized the nine of us was fixin' to make him a monk,” said Sarah, “he throwed up his hands and shouted, ‘Let it be known I gave Miss Omega every consideration under the sun!'”

“At your earliest convenience, I should like you to hunt up two exhibits,” Chloe told the sultanas. “A live puffer-fish and a human skeleton.”

Rebecca announced that she knew where to find the second commodity: decades earlier a man had been hanged from a catclaw tree in Storm-Petrel Cove—most likely a pirate who'd fallen out of favor with his colleagues. “The birds and worms made short work of him. But how do them bones figure in your scheme fer enchantin' the jury?”

“My testimony turns on transmutationism,” said Chloe. “This theory invites us to ask, ‘Why does God go to all the bother of existing?'”

“I don't know what you're talkin' about,” said Naomi, “but if you succeed in vexatin' Orrin, that's good enough fer us.”

Before leaving Duntopia, Chloe visited the Colnett barrel. By her calculation sufficient time had elapsed for Algernon to have reached England, rescued Papa, and entrusted the news to a whaling master bound for the Horn and points north. Sorting through the heap of printed matter, she indeed encountered a version of her name, though the message couldn't have originated with Algernon, who would never have addressed a letter to
KLOWEE BATHIRST ON THE GUVNOR'S EYELAND
.

Evidently the Jesuit missionaries had established a tradition of literacy amongst the Huancabamba
pagés,
for Princess Akawo began her letter by explaining that she'd dictated it to the village shaman. Despite its orthographic irregularities, Chloe easily apprehended Akawo's heartening message. Not only had Princess Ibanua and the liberated
seringueiros
arrived safely in the Jequetepeque valley, but Prince Gitika had appeared shortly thereafter with the remaining Indians, the Marañón valley campaign having played out exactly as planned.

After securing the letter in her rucksack, she continued excavating the barrel. Alas, no word from Algernon. Inevitably an unnerving question popped into her brain. If the scheme to free her father had gone awry, and if by some quirk of circumstance
Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn
persuaded the jurors to disavow their Creator, would she then be obligated to visit Alastor Hall, recapitulate her disproof, and win the £10,000 on Papa's behalf? This imagined
scenario
was surely amongst the most disturbing ever visited upon an apostle of the Presence, and she spent the remainder of the day attempting, though without success, to evade its contemplation.

*   *   *

It was on the vast and sumptuous Galápagos isle of Albemarle that Chloe Bathurst, galvanized by her previous night's study of Charles Darwin's essay and her inability to imagine an event more calamitous than the public execution of her friends, at long last found her Tree of Life.

Her revelation occurred at noon, heralded by perfume, the
Lamarck
having touched down in a flowery depression between the dormant Sierra Negra and Mount Azul volcanoes. Spun from some trade wind or other, a vagrant breeze wafted through the larboard window, cooling her brow and filling the carriage with the scent of orchids and hibiscus.

Bamboo birdcages fashioned by Orrin Eggwort's harem jammed the gondola floor to ceiling. Chloe selected four cages, wrapped her arms about them, and, taking leave of Capitaine Léourier, strode towards the valley in search of ornithological ripostes to the Jehovah hypothesis. According to her bestiary, the defense exhibits must ultimately include the three Galápagos varieties of flycatcher, the four distinct kinds of mockingbird, and at least six species of finch. Presumably the task would prove simple, Encantadas birds being so famously tame.

And suddenly there it was, rising from the island's heart, a towering plant with glowing ivory limbs and fragrant white blossoms. In his travel journal Mr. Darwin had identified this species as the
palo santo,
the “holy wood” tree. The name was at once pagan and Christian, tracing not only to an alleged efficacy against
mala energía,
“bad energy,” but also to a familial relationship with frankincense and myrrh.

She knew her Tree of Life not by its fruits but by its tenants. At that moment the
palo santo
hosted three sorts of bird. Sprightly descendant of the South American grassquit (or so the transmutation sketch averred), a male woodpecker finch exhibited a characteristic behavior, using a prickly-pear cactus spine to pry an insect larva from a branch. Evolutionary offspring of a long-tailed songster still thriving on the South American continent, a male short-billed mockingbird, wreathed in gray feathers, gave voice to a serenade. Creamy of breast, brown of wing, and boasting (like her fellow
palo santo
occupants) a genealogy tracing to the mainland, a female broad-billed flycatcher stared directly at Chloe. For anyone who'd read
The Voyage of the Beagle
the bird's intentions were readily discerned. The creature meant to abandon the tree and plunder Chloe's scalp, human hair being amongst those materials with which flycatchers were pleased to build their nests.

She set down the bamboo cages. Woodpecker finch, short-billed mockingbird, broad-billed flycatcher: three distinct species descended with modification from a common ancestor that had in turn descended with modification from a creature that had likewise descended, so that if you applied your imagination fully to this Tree of Life, making a fanciful pilgrimage downwards along its twigs and branches, you would find that the avian families represented here were connected not only to all the world's other birds but also (in some astonishingly long-ago era) to the domeshelled tortoises now shambling through the dale, to the terrestrial iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks, to the prickly-pear cactus (here the wayfarer needed to visit a time before Professor Owen's dinosaurs) from which the woodpecker finch had taken his tool, and even to the very
palo santo
where the birds were presently perched. Eyes welling with tears, she apprehended the whole tapestry, an immense and magisterial network binding together everything that now lived, had ever lived, and ever would live—and so it was that she became once again a devotee of the theory of natural selection: a loyalty that would long endure, she suspected, woodpecker finches, short-billed mockingbirds, and broad-billed flycatchers being such incontrovertible conjunctions of beaks and claws and feathers, such irrefutable incarnations of flight and song and reproductive success.

“When the defense makes its case next week,” she told the uncomprehending birds, “the Covent Garden Transmutationist will testify.”

Having found the object of his quest, the woodpecker finch took wing, bearing away the delicious insect larva and the God of Chloe's epiphany. Next the mockingbird flew off, leaving behind a bracingly profane absence. Finally the flycatcher quit the
palo santo
and soared straight for her. Landing atop Chloe's head, the bird snapped at her scalp, then delivered the hair to an emergent nest in a nearby catclaw tree. An instant later the flycatcher, returning, stole a second hair, adding it to her nest, and then she claimed a third such strand.

“I saw the bird attack you,” said Léourier, arriving on the scene. “By your tears I know she caused you pain.”

“I felt no discomfort,” said Chloe, retrieving the topmost cage. “
Attendez, mon ami.
The angels have molted and died. There is no God.”

“Mademoiselle,
je suis désolé
.” Léourier placed a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “I remember when I first understood that life lacks a supernatural meaning, a traumatic event for me,
très triste
. The loss of faith is always an occasion for weeping.”

“But these are tears of joy.”

“Larmes de joie?”

“Because today it was my privilege to befriend a broad-billed flycatcher,” she explained. “No, not simply to befriend her, but to secure her family's prosperity. At this particular moment I ask nothing more of the world.”

 

13

The Tortoises of the Encantadas at Long Last Have Their Day in Court, as Do the Land Lizards, Marine Iguanas, Mockingbirds, and Finches

What most pleased Malcolm Chadwick about Miss Bathurst's latest change of worldview was that, this time around, she'd embraced Charles Darwin's theory not for monetary gain or personal aggrandizement but because she believed it to be true. On first hearing of her return to the transmutationist fold, Malcolm enacted within his heart a private
carnaval de la victoria,
as well as a scene of Miss Bathurst and himself connecting with a kiss. Until that startling moment he'd certainly regarded her as a worthy person, but now it seemed his attitude also partook of Aphrodite's domain. He decided to tell Miss Bathurst nothing of this development, as any romantic protestation on his part would surely distract her from the daunting task at hand.

“I hope your inverse Road to Damascus has not pained you intolerably,” he said.

In an absent tone Miss Bathurst replied, “My emotions are not unlike those that attended my long-ago miscarriage—exhilaration mingled with bereavement.”

“I see,” said Malcolm, though in fact he did not.

“And now, Reverend, having made that paradoxical observation, I would ask that we speak no more of the matter.”

He nodded and said, “The world is already too full of words.”

Whilst preparing the case for the defense, Malcolm soon realized that Capitaine Léourier's perspective on the Tree of Life would prove indispensable. Though a man of scientific sensibility, the aeronaut found the idea of non-Lamarckian evolution far from self-evident, which made him the ideal critic of the team's intended strategy.

After listening to Léourier's analysis of their rehearsals, Malcolm and Miss Bathurst concluded that, during the phase of her testimony concerning birds, she should refrain from naming any living South American species that might have given rise to a Galápagos variant, lest Eggwort demand that exemplars be brought before the jurors. (Instead she must aver that the continental forebears of all Encantadas birds were extinct, their fossilized bones still awaiting discovery in Ecuador, Peru, or Chile.) Equally vital was Léourier's anticipation of an argument with which the chief prosecutor would surely attempt to rattle Mademoiselle Bathurst. Why should a scientifically inclined Christian not insist that the principle of natural selection had originated in the mind of God?

“One need merely assert that the Almighty put this process in place on the eighth day of Creation,” said the aeronaut, “so that his newly formed animals and their descendants could adapt to future changes in their environments, and—
voilà
—the atheist position crumbles.”