Galapagos Regained (56 page)

“God loves you,” I assured her. “Your team loves you. I love you.”

“God hates me,” Dr. Franklin reiterated. Softening, she ran her fingers along my bare wrist like a flautist working her instrument, using her free hand to inhale a draught of hashish. “What I've been missing all these years is an empathetic partner, and finally I've found one, except—damn—it doesn't
matter
.”

“My dear Rosalind,” I said, immeasurably touched to infer she imagined joining her life to mine.

“Watson had Crick,” she continued, coughing, “and Crick had Watson, and at long last I've found Aaron Klug. Ours is an extraordinary collaboration. We keep each other honest. Ah, what heights we might have scaled together.”

“By my reckoning,” I said, struggling to conceal my disappointment, “you've accomplished more in thirty-seven years than most people do in seventy.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. Your story will become a hallowed chapter in the chronicles of biology.” I salved my psychic wound with a puff of hemp. “I cannot but think of Père Teilhard. He, too, found the perfect partner, a sculptress named Lucile.”

“I looked into Teilhard as you asked. I'm afraid that three years ago your friend suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage—though at least this meant his eccentric views on evolution could finally see print. The Vatican loves dead visionaries. I read
Le Phénomène Humain
as my young men were carrying me to Constantinople.”

“A beautiful book, is it not?”

“I wouldn't know. Your Gallic biomystic is rather too deep for me. No, let me be candid, Bertram. I didn't care for
Le Phénomène Humain
. In my view orthogenesis, like all teleology, is an insult to a God whose nonexistence is one of His few admirable attributes. How could Teilhard have possibly seen a benign hand at work in the spectacle of
Australopithecus africanus
involuntarily ceding the planet to
Pithecanthropus erectus,
who then must yield to
Homo neanderthalensis,
who in turn gets shoved aside by the Cro-Magnons? Is such epic disorder really the only way the Supreme Being could have gotten His darling
Homo sapiens
on stage? If the ugly, wasteful, brutal mechanisms of evolution strike your priest as sacred, I shudder to imagine what he finds profane.”

“I'm sure Teilhard could address your bewilderment.”

“No doubt.” A diminutive woman under the best of circumstances, Dr. Franklin suddenly seemed to shrink in upon herself. “So much work ahead. Aaron will do me proud, I know it.” She coughed convulsively. “Heed the words of Rosalind the Jewish prophet. Throughout the first half of the dreadful twentieth century humanity made war on itself, but in the second half microbes will make war on humanity.”

“Microbes?”

“Tiny lives devoted entirely to their own self-interest,” she rasped. “Darwin himself was probably a victim of the protozoan that causes Chagas disease. In Patagonia he was attacked by the benchuca, the great black bug of the Pampas, known to carry
Trypanosoma cruzi
.” A spasm racked her frame, and then another, and another, each episode accompanied by a cry of pain, and yet she managed to continue. “Insidious as protozoans and bacteria can be, viruses are even worse. Opportunists, one and all, exploiting whatever works: exotic mutation, promiscuous variation, indiscriminate reproduction. Unless we cause polio and smallpox and their ilk to go extinct, gone with the trilobites, they'll gain the upper hand. It's all about mindless evolutionary strategies, not imaginary Omega Points. One day the unthinkable will happen. Courtesy of some malign enzyme or other, a family of single-strand RNA viruses will learn how to transcribe themselves into DNA, the better to appropriate our cells. But we'll fight back. We always do. I want to be there on the front lines. I don't want to see Brussels and die.”

I must finish this message ere my tears strike the ink and smear my words. Alas, Father, in truth even Brussels was denied to Dr. Franklin. Shortly after making her point about malign enzymes, she fell across my lap. I felt for her pulse. She had none.

Immediately her young men took charge, explaining that they must get her back to the Royal Marsden Hospital ere she was missed. At a funereal pace they bore their mentor out of the smoky grotto, feet first, as if preparing to bury her at sea, so that my final glimpse of Dr. Franklin included her silent lips, lifeless eyes, and lovely brow. Against the odds, she'd never lost her hair.

Your sorrowful son,

Bertram

In light of the lachrymose contents of this latest message, Granville canceled the rehearsal of Heathway's Columbine Carnival. To pursue so frivolous a business would constitute an affront not only to Mr. Dalrymple (who had so devoutly desired to shore up Christendom with a three-hundred-cubit corroboration of the Deluge), not only to Miss Franklin (who would never see her virus exhibit displayed in Brussels), but also to his grieving son. Instead Granville decided to honor the late crystallographer. Taking up his brush, he began to impose a second image atop
Wall on Wall,
rendering his vision through bold strokes and vivid colors.

Within the hour the tribute was complete: a still life comprising a dozen DNA double helices, each boasting two sugar-phosphate spirals rendered in magenta, as opposed to the cyan and yellow Granville had selected for the adenine-thymine rungs, and the orange and green he'd employed (being skilled in concocting secondary colors from primaries) for the guanine-cytosine pairs. The molecules all pointed in different directions, like compass needles that knew nothing of north. Dr. Franklin, he decided, would have wanted it that way: no ultimate purpose, no teleology—just logical, coherent, and beautiful forms, signifying everything.

*   *   *

That night the defense team bedded down in the gondola of the airship, but only Léourier, aided by Peruvian snuff, actually slept. Chloe and Mr. Chadwick huddled in the darkness, drinking
pisco
and talking of God-driven evolution. The argument that natural selection could be construed as “a kind of divine musical instrument,” in the vicar's words, “always needing the Almighty's breath to make the notes come forth,” was not easily countered—and yet the worldview of the worthy Epicurus seemed equal to the task. Shortly before dawn, Chloe and Mr. Chadwick closed their eyes, soothed by their belief that if they lost
Duntopia versus Cabot and Quinn
it would not be for want of a retort to evangelical Deism.

The next morning Chloe arrayed herself in her Lady Omega gown and Panama hat, strapped on her grandfather's bayonet, seized the sandalwood box, and led the defense team to the tabernacle. Judge Eggwort's seraglio was waiting outside, surrounded by a menagerie of tethered lizards, free-roaming tortoises, and caged birds. Chirps and twitters filled the muggy air. Whilst Rebecca and Hagar held up a glass punch bowl wherein swam the requested puffer-fish (just then the creature was deflated, its bristles invisible), the pregnant Naomi pointed to a wicker basket and announced that it contained the promised human skeleton. Chloe instructed the cleavewives to have both the skull and the lower spine at the ready.

The defense team entered the steamy courtroom. Fans fluttering wildly, the spectators suggested a flock of Floreana flamingos beating their wings whilst ascending
en masse
from Stopsack's lagoon. Ralph and Solange had already taken their seats, each wearing the despondent expression of a person playing piquet with the Devil. Judge Eggwort lost no time hammering the Court to order.

“Mr. Chadwick, you may examine your first witness.”

“My first and only witness,” said the vicar. “The defense calls Lady Omega.”

Snatching up the sandalwood box, Chloe approached the witness chair. Inevitably she imagined that she was crossing a London stage, swathed in limelight, the curtain having just risen on
The Ashes of Eden
, an edifying spectacle written by Miss Bathurst of Covent Garden. Linus Hatch came forward and bid her swear to speak nothing but the truth, so help her God. She raised no theological objections. The goal, after all, was not to hoard every pawn but to put her opponent's king in irremediable check.

Squeezing the Book of Mormon with one hand, the grip of the bayonet with the other, she said, loudly and clearly, “I so swear.”

“Lady Omega, please tell the Court how you came to be in Galápagos,” said Mr. Chadwick.

She began by praising Judge Eggwort for his discernment. Of all their Encantadas acquaintances, she declared, he alone had apprehended that, although it had once amused her to play a divine messenger, she in fact held no such heavenly commission.

“If you're not a prophet, then who are you?” asked Mr. Chadwick.

“Simply another English explorer with a passion for the tropics,” Chloe replied. “Unlike my colleagues, however, I am moved to acquire specimens that tell against the existence of God.” It took the jurymen and the spectators a moment to assimilate this startling sentence, whereupon they gasped in unison. “I fell upon this theory whilst working at a private zoological garden built by a Derbyshire naturalist whom I shall call Derrick Caedmon.”

“During your employment by Mr. Caedmon, did you go by the name of Lady Omega?” asked Mr. Chadwick.

“I was merely Miss Chloe Bathurst.”

“English naturalists don't normally build private zoos.”

“It was a combination aviary, arboretum, and herpetorium, ideal for Mr. Caedmon's scientific investigations. When he began his work, discovering a disproof of God was the last thing on his mind, but that is nevertheless what occurred.” Chloe unboxed the transmutation sketch. “He summarized his findings in this treatise, which frames the natural world as an unimaginably dense tree or bush, each branch and twig reserved to a particular species, some living, others extinct. Allow me to quote the final paragraph. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction having been originally breathed into one or a few kinds, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling according to fixed laws, and whilst land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through processes of gradual selection and infinitesimal modifications, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.'”

“As I understand this theory,” said the vicar, “the primal creatures in question were animalcules capable of sexual reproduction.”

Chloe nodded sagely. “But because they died out long ago, leaving no trace, we must begin with something more complex.” She clapped her hands. “Fish!”

Rebecca and Hagar strode into the courtroom jointly carrying the puffer in its punch bowl. Léourier relieved them of the glass receptacle and, approaching the jury box, displayed its deflated occupant.

“Let's pretend that this puffer isn't a modern fish but a very ancient species, long since vanished,” said Chloe as Léourier set the punch bowl on the defense table. “In other words, a proto-puffer, lacking the barbs that will characterize its descendants. Mr. Caedmon asks us to imagine that, millions of years ago, several populations of proto-puffers became isolated from one another—perhaps owing to falling sea levels or to coral-reef formation or volcanic activity. Inevitably the offspring of the offspring of these cloistered fish would have diverged from the ancestral type in form and custom, for such is the way of all fins, scales, plumage, fur, and flesh.”

“A natural law understood by every animal breeder,” noted Mr. Chadwick.

Chloe fanned herself with the essay. “When we consider the external stresses continually visited upon animal populations—I speak of famines, predators, contagions, floods, and frosts—when we consider these pressures in all their frequency and intensity, we may safely assume that
most
of the spontaneously occurring variations in an individual's fins, scales, plumage, fur, or flesh cannot possibly secure its prosperity.
Most
such variations, yes—but not
all
. Some of these accidental novelties may bless the creature with an advantage in the struggle for existence. Perhaps Nature favored a few proto-puffers with uncommonly strong tails, or keener eyes, or camouflaging scales.”

“Or protective needles,” Mr. Chadwick suggested.

Chloe rapped on the punch bowl, and the fish inflated itself like Léourier's balloon, becoming a sphere of fearsome spicules. “Protective needles, indeed, an endowment so discouraging to predators that many of these lucky fish reached sexual maturity and reproduced, thus passing on the desirable trait, which in time spread through the entire population. Please note that this transmutation, proto-puffer to modern puffer, has occurred without the intervention of any outside agency.”

“Such as, for instance, God?” asked Mr. Chadwick.

Chloe smiled obliquely and said, “Now imagine that over the ages Nature bestowed primitive lungs and rudimentary limbs on some puffer populations, with the result that their descendants' descendants' descendants could survive on land as well as in water, an innovation so advantageous that those lungs and limbs proliferated. Obviously the creatures in question have long since ceased being puffers, or even fish, but must instead be classified as amphibians.” Again she clapped her hands. “Land iguanas!”

Sarah entered the tabernacle, the flat-spined terrestrial iguana draped over her outstretched arms like a coiled rug. Behind her walked Miriam, cradling the high-spined specimen to her bosom.

“What disgustin' monsters,” gasped Jake the fornicator.