Galapagos Regained (54 page)

Malcolm recalled how, back in Manáos, the naturalist Alfred Wallace had proclaimed that God was the author of evolution. At the time Malcolm had found the young man's stance untenable. (“Mr. Wallace is merely saying that the universe exists, something I already knew.”) Today, however, as articulated by Léourier, this alternative to a wholly materialist view of evolution seemed formidable indeed.

“You are advancing an argument that might be called … well, I'm not sure what to call it,” Malcolm told Léourier.

“Evangelical Deism?” suggested Miss Bathurst.

“Very good,” said Malcolm. “When in doubt, devise an oxymoron. In the beginning God the Father created the laws of Nature and proceeded to dwell within them, whilst Christ the Son and his associate the Holy Ghost set about securing eternal life for the more pious members of their favorite species. Should Darwin's theory ever become ascendant, we may be confident that some form of evangelical Deism will rise along with it.”

“Then let us toast the theologians of the future,” said Léourier in a sardonic tone, “who will appropriate the bread of science even as they devour the wafers of salvation. Such clever apologists. They will have their Host and eat it, too. But how do we dismantle their argument?”

“I haven't the foggiest idea,” said Malcolm.

“At the eleventh hour we shall formulate a riposte,” said Miss Bathurst. “We may never overpower Mr. Darwin's antagonists, but we can certainly out-think them.”

On the morning that the trial was to commence, Malcolm and Léourier escorted their expert witness from her Hood's Isle shack to the moored
Lamarck.
Dressed in her pirate regalia and Panama hat, she clutched the boxed transmutation essay and an equally crucial document, the bestiary, its pages now arranged to indicate the order in which Eggwort's concubines must bring each exhibit on stage. Under clear skies the defense team flew to Charles Isle, landing in Post Office Bay. Sorting through the contents of the Colnett barrel, Malcolm determined that no letter had arrived from Algernon Bathurst, nor had Bishop Wilberforce sent a message concerning the disposition of the Shelley Prize. How weirdly poetic it would be if the recently resurrected Albion Transmutationist Club brought atheism to Duntopia on the very day the Mayfair Diluvian League sailed a gopher-wood proof of God up the Thames.

After negotiating the foothills of Mount Pajas, the defense team entered Minor Zion, whereupon Miss Bathurst presented the eldest of Eggwort's concubines with the bestiary. “Yesterday our high-spined lizard went a-missin', but I'm happy to report he showed up this mornin',” said Rebecca Eggwort, leafing through the
dramatis personae
. “'Fraid we lost track of them two little black iguanas from Tower, but we got everythin' else you need, includin' the puffer-fish and the pirate skeleton.”

“You must find those lizards posthaste,” Miss Bathurst insisted.

“Might a couple extra Duntopian reds suffice?” asked Mrs. Eggwort. “Or maybe we could sail across the bay and catch us some Indefatigable multicoloreds.”

“Thank you, Rebecca, but I require
varieties,
the more the better.”

The defense team proceeded to the plaza, where scores of shackled men, quite likely the penal colony's entire English-speaking population, occupied themselves with scratching their armpits and spitting into the dust. Dressed in burlap tunics so tattered they would have embarrassed a scarecrow, their heads covered with burlap skullcaps, the inmates fidgeted beneath the stern gazes of a dozen armed guards commanded by the same strapping officer who'd taken the convicts in hand five months earlier. A lanky Duntopian with watery eyes and an Old Testament beard approached Malcolm, introducing the commander as Capitán Machado and himself as “Associate Emperor Jethro Tappert, the Latter-Day Saint who'll be representin' the Divine Plaintiff in this here case.”

“I must say, you look the part of God's attorney,” Malcolm observed.

“I think of myself more as Satan's bane,” said Mr. Tappert, wiping his brow with a red kerchief. He wore pristine dungarees and a green-and-black checked cotton shirt. “So tell me, Mr. Chadwick, why does so distinguished a gentleman as yourself decide to defend the slimy likes of Cabot and Quinn? In my view the gallows is too good fer such varmints. I would sooner see 'em boiled in oil or quartered by giant tortoises, but our charter don't allow it.”

“Good sir, have you forgotten the most sacred principle upon which Anglo-American jurisprudence is founded?” asked Malcolm. “I refer to the presumption of innocence.”

“Presumption of innocence, hah—I
knew
you'd try some sleazy lawyer trick! Maybe it works with the hoity-toities, but here in Duntopia we don't coddle blasphemers. Right now Orrin wants us to pick the jurors, a task fer which we'll be needin' the wisdom of Solomon and the forbearance of the martyrs.”

“I have neither,” said Malcolm.

“Truth to tell, I don't see how we're gonna manage it.” Tappert guided the defense team towards the White Horse Prophecy Tabernacle. “
I'll
be hopin' to plant twelve God-fearin' believers in the jury box, and
you'll
settle fer nothin' less than a dozen libertine atheists.”

Now Miss Bathurst spoke up, explaining that her team would be satisfied to put but a single question to each prospective juror. “It's a mere ten words long,” she told Tappert. “Quote, ‘Do you think it possible dogs were bred from wolves?' Unquote.”

“Wolves?” said the chief prosecutor. “There ain't no wolves in Galápagos.”

“Attend my testimony carefully, Mr. Tappert,” said Miss Bathurst. “Thou shalt learn whence thou came and whither thou goest.”

As Malcolm entered the building, pieces of his past came flooding back—his oft-repeated experience of walking into a rustic church and finding himself deeply moved by its holy simplicity. With its bronze candlesticks instead of gold and its windowsills supporting not stained-glass mosaics but vases of modest yellow cactus flowers, the Mormon tabernacle was precisely the sort of place God would have been pleased to visit back in the days when He existed. Someone had rearranged the furnishings, pushing aside the pulpit, piano, and baptismal tub, giving preeminence to a mahogany altar. On Sunday this appointment would again perform a sacred function, but for now it was a judge's bench. Balanced on an adjacent stool, wearing a solemn black suit that would have served him equally well for conducting a funeral, Orrin Eggwort scanned the Book of Mormon. A few yards away, seated at a table bearing a sign reading
PROSECUTION TEAM
, a corpulent Latter-Day Saint dressed in striped blue overalls pored over the same consecrated text.

“Meet my deputy, Assistant Emperor Linus Hatch,” Tappert told Malcolm. “Linus, this here's the chief counsel.”

“Tell me, Mr. Hatch,” asked Malcolm, “what is your opinion of the presumption of innocence?”

“As a fallen man,” the deputy prosecutor replied in a gravelly voice, “stained by Adam's sin though redeemed by Christ's blood, I would never go around presumin' anyone's innocence, includin' my own, and certainly not the innocence of guilty folk like Cabot and Quinn.”

Malcolm rolled his eyes and faced the bench. “Emperor Eggwort, do you concur with these peculiar views?”

“It's
Judge
Eggwort today.” The chief magistrate snapped his Book of Mormon shut. “Like my fellow Duntopians, I'm disinclined to hold any person blameless. Noah was blameless. Job was blameless. It's a short list.”

“Permit me a second question,” said Malcolm. “It concerns arithmetic. Because my clients are accused of a capital crime, the jury must reach a unanimous verdict, correct?”

“Unanimous, yep,” said Eggwort. “Convince all twelve that God don't exist, and I'll cancel your clients' appointments with the hangman.”

Malcolm suddenly found himself back on the pitching deck of the
Equinox,
the gale howling all about him. “By the norms of English justice, we need to convince but
one
juror!”

“If you've got an itch fer English justice, Padre, I suggest you take a trip to England. That said, I'm not averse to compromisin'. If eight jurors cast ‘not guilty' votes, both defendants will walk free.”

“Make it four.”

“No,” said Eggwort.

“I implore you, sir, four. Or else five.”

“Six.”

“Very well, six,” growled Malcolm. He exchanged dismayed glances with Miss Bathurst and Léourier, then approached a table on which a sheet of foolscap displayed the words
DEFENSE TEAM
. “Judge Eggwort, I suspect you're about to be hoist by your own petard. Once word of this trial gets out, the world at large will call for your abdication.”

“We ain't keen on the world at large around here, and the same goes fer petards,” Eggwort replied. “Mr. Hatch, go fetch us the first candidate.”

Thanks to the elegance of Miss Bathurst's membership criterion, whereby a man might join the jury merely by allowing that dogs may have descended from wolves, the selection process proceeded apace. Of the twenty prisoners interviewed that morning, Tappert rejected one on grounds of professed atheism, two in consequence of imbecility, and a fourth for being as deaf as a clam. Malcolm, meanwhile, eliminated two who claimed that dogs were designed by God, plus one who thought the defendants Satanists who'd accidently burned the
Covenant
in a human sacrifice gone awry. Thus it happened (in an irony of the sort Miss Bathurst savored) that a panel of twelve accomplished lawbreakers were empowered to bring justice to Duntopia. The arsonists' destiny lay in the dubious hands of Joe the poacher, Ben the horse thief, Jake the fornicator, Harry the panderer, Tim the anarchist, Pete the highwayman, George the train robber, Dick the swindler, Walter the forger, Nathan the pickpocket, Amos the sodomite, and Clarence the usurer.

“Not the ideal
fraternité
for our purposes,” said Léourier. “I fear Monsieur Darwin's argument will elude them.”

“Let us remember that Christ's disciples were likewise an inauspicious lot,” said Malcolm. “Just as the Galilean turned twelve unpromising Judeans into Christians, so shall we turn twelve unpromising Christians into transmutationists.”

“In fact, the odds are better in our case,” said Miss Bathurst. “We've got our tortoises and our iguanas, our mockingbirds and our finches, and all Jesus had were some gaudy miracles and his supposed descent from on high.”

Without saying a word, Malcolm sidled towards his expert witness and, forming his arms in a loop as wide as the Colnett barrel, embraced her. What he most admired about Miss Bathurst was that she never stopped being a little bit mad.

*   *   *

Although Galápagos was cooler than the majority of tropical archipelagos, or so Mr. Darwin's travel journal asserted, the noon hour brought waves of blazing heat to the White Horse Prophecy Tabernacle. Seated at the defense table, talking amongst themselves, a perspiring Chloe and her equally damp colleagues considered how they might counter evangelical Deism, that formidable argument whereby, far from being displaced by the Tree of Life, God lay immanent in its every leaf.

Suddenly Mr. Chadwick clucked his tongue and, fanning himself with his straw hat, informed Chloe and Capitaine Léourier that he might, just might, have the answer.

“I recall a gathering of the Oxford rakehells at which somebody read from Lucretius's
On the Nature of Things,
a long first-century poem celebrating Epicureanism—Shelley's preferred philosophical system. The passage concerned the outrageous death of Iphigenia.”

“Sacrificed by her own father for a fair wind,” said Léourier. “Trojan War stories have always held a particular fascination for me.”

“Arguably our species once stood at a crossroads,” said Mr. Chadwick, “a moment when, owing to Lucretius,
Homo sapiens
might have acquired a modest cast of mind, refusing to fancy itself a phenomenon of abiding interest to the gods. We know what came to pass. The Roman poet lost. The Roman Church won. But events might have unfolded otherwise. In my reimagining of human history, our species has adopted Epicurus's humble materialism, which Democritus so memorably anticipated. ‘By convention bitter—'”

“‘By convention bitter, by convention sweet,'” quoted Léourier. “‘By convention hot, by convention cold. But in reality: atoms and void.'”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Chadwick. “Now suppose that one fateful day a bearded prophet stumbles out of the wilderness, claiming that a supernatural entity, at once immaterial and very human-like, inhabits the laws of Nature and makes them happen. Do our atomists face a philosophical crisis? Well, no. Do they worry about harmonizing the prophet's worldview with their own? Certainly not. Bound by their ideals of humility and reason, they listen carefully to the hairy visionary, then politely inform him that his argument would be impressive were it not absurd.”

“Though it remains to be seen whether our jurymen are likewise bound by ideals of humility and reason,” said Chloe, “I believe your Epicurus may have saved the day.”

Brow gleaming with a tiara of sweat, Rebecca Eggwort burst into the room and announced, to Chloe's great relief, that the wayward Tower Isle iguanas had been found, after which Miriam, Sarah, and pregnant Naomi entered carrying ceramic pitchers and tin cups. Bustling about the tabernacle, the sultanas supplied the court personnel with fresh water, not excluding the jury foreman—Joe the poacher—and his colleagues, chained together in three ranks and seated uncomfortably in a gallery constructed of cheese casks. Next to appear were Eggwort's five remaining wives, bearing copper tureens filled with crab chowder, which they served in wooden bowls to the jurymen. With noisy passion the twelve devoured their lunches. Obviously they'd not had a proper meal since leaving England.