"Darwinia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Chapter Six

England at last, Colin Watson thought: but it wasn’t really England at all, was it? The Canadian cargo vessel steamed up the broad estuary of the Thames, its prow cutting into tidal waters the color of green tea: tropical, at least this time of year. Like visiting Bombay or Bihar. Certainly not like coming home.

He thought of the cargo rocking in the holds below. Coal from South Africa, India, Australia, a precious commodity in this age of rebellion and the fraying Empire. Tools and dies from Canada. And hundreds of crated Lee-Enfield rifles from the factory in Alberta, all bound for Kitchener’s Folly, New London, making a safe place in the wilderness, for the day when an English king was restored to an English throne.

The rifles were Watson’s responsibility. As soon as the ship was moored at the primitive docks he ordered his men — a few Sikhs and grumbling Canadians — to cinch and lift the pallets, while he went ashore to sign manifests for the Port Authority. The heat was stifling, and this crude wooden town was not by any stretch of the imagination London. And yet to be here brought home the reality of the Conversion of Europe, which for Watson had been a faraway event, as strange and as inherently implausible as a fairy tale, except that so many had indisputably died.

Certainly this wasn’t the country he had sailed from a decade ago. He had graduated from public school without merit and taken training from the Officer Corps at Woolwich: exchanged one barracks for another, Latin declensions for artillery maneuvers. In his naïveté he had expected G.A. Henty, a dignified heroism, Ndebele rebels fleeing the point of his sword. He had arrived instead at a dusty barracks in Cairo overseeing a rabble of bored infantrymen, until that night when the sky lit up with coruscating fire and the quaking earth shook down the British Protectorate in Egypt, among so many other things. An aimless enough life, but there had been the consolations of friendship and strong drink or, more tenuously, of God and Country, until 1912 made it clear that God was a cipher and that if He existed at all He must surely have despised the English.

Britain’s remaining military power had been concentrated on shoring up her possessions in India and South Africa. Southern Rhodesia had fallen, Salisbury burning like an autumn bonfire; Egypt and Sudan were lost to the Moslem rebels. Watson had been rescued from the hostile ruins of Cairo and placed on a hideously crowded troop transport bound for Canada. He spent months in a relocation barracks in the tall-timber country of British Columbia, was transferred at last to a prairie town where Kitchener’s government-in-exile had established a small-arms factory.

He hadn’t been an exceptional officer before 1912. Had he changed, or had the Army changed around him? He excelled as a sort of Officer Corps shop steward; lived monkishly, survived bitter winters and dry, enervating summers with a surprising degree of patience. The knowledge that he might as easily have been beheaded by Mahdists enforced a certain humility. Eventually he was ordered to Ottawa, where military engineers were in demand as the reconstruction gathered momentum.

It was called “reconstruction” but it was also called Kitchener’s Folly: the founding of a new London on the banks of a river that was only approximately the Thames. Building Jerusalem in a green and unpleasant land. Only a gesture, critics said, but even the gesture would have been impossible if not for the crippled but still powerful Royal Navy. The United States had put forward its arrogant claim that Europe should be “free and open to resettlement and without borders” — the so-called Wilson Doctrine, which meant in practice an American hegemony, an American New World. The German and French rump regimes, gutted by conflicting claims of legitimacy and the loss of European resources, backed down after a few shots were exchanged. Kitchener had been able to negotiate an exception for the British Isles, which provoked more protest. But the displaced remnants of Old Europe, lacking any real industrial base, could hardly face down the combined power of the Royal Navy and the White Fleet.

And so, a standoff. But not, Watson thought, a stable one. For instance: this civilian freighter and its military cargo. He had been assigned to oversee a Clandestine shipment of arms from Halifax to London. He supposed the armory there was being stocked, but it hadn’t been the first such shipment under Kitchener’s private orders and likely wouldn’t be the last. Watson couldn’t guess why the New World needed so many rifles and Maxim guns and mortars… unless the peace wasn’t as peaceful as it seemed.

The voyage had passed uneventfully. The seas were calm, the days so bright they might have been hammered in blue metal. Watson had used his ample free time to reconsider his life. Compared to some, he had emerged from the tragedy of 1912 relatively lightly. His parents were dead before the Conversion and he had no siblings, no wife or children to grieve for. Only a way of life. A baggage of fading memories. The past was cut loose and the years, absent compass or ballast, had passed terribly quickly. Perhaps it was fitting then that he had blown back to England at last: to this new England, this feverish pseudo-England. To this hot, prosaic Port Authority in a brick blockhouse gray with dust. He identified himself, was shown into a back room and introduced to a portly South African merchant who had volunteered his warehouse to shelter the munitions until the Armory was ready to receive them. Pierce, the man’s name was. Jered Pierce.

Watson put out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Pierce.”

The South African closed Watson’s hand in his own huge paw. “Likewise, sir, I’m sure.”

Caroline was frightened of London but bored in the cramped warren of her uncle’s store. She had taken over her aunt Alice’s chores from time to time, and that was all right, but there was Lily to worry about. Caroline didn’t want her playing alone in the street, where the dust was thick and the gutters unspeakable, and indoors she was a constant terror, chasing the cat or holding tea parties with Alice’s china figurines. So when Alice offered to watch Lily while Caroline took Jered’s lunch to the docks, Caroline was grateful for the break. She felt suddenly unchained and deliciously alone.

She had promised herself she wouldn’t think about Guilford this afternoon, and she tried to focus her attention elsewhere. A group of grubby English children — to think, the youngest of them might have been born in this nightmarish place! — ran past her. One boy dragged a bush jumper behind him on a string; the animal’s six pale green legs pumped frantically and its dark eyes rolled with fear. Maybe it was good, that fear. Good that in this half-human world the terror worked both ways. These were thoughts she could never have shared with Guilford.

But Guilford was gone. Well, there, Caroline thought: admit it. Only disaster could bring him back before autumn, and probably not even that. She supposed he had already entered the back country of Darwinia, a place even stranger than this grim shadow of London.

She had stopped asking herself why. He had explained patiently a dozen times, and his answers made a superficial kind of sense. But Caroline knew he had other motives, unspoken, powerful as tides. The wilderness had called out to Guilford and Guilford had run away to it, and never mind the savage animals, the wild rivers, the fevers and the bandits. Like an unhappy little boy, he had run away from home.

And left her here. She hated this England, hated even to call it that. She hated its noises, both the clatter of human commerce and the sounds of nature (worse!) that leaked through the window at night, sounds whose sources were wholly mysterious to her, a chattering as of insects; a keening as of some small, injured dog. She hated the stench of it, and she hated its poisonous forests and haunted rivers. London was a prison guarded by monsters.

She turned onto the river road. Trenches and sewers trickled their burden of waste into the Thames; raucous gulls raced over the water. Caroline gazed aloofly at the river traffic. Far off across the brown water a silt snake raised its head, its pebbled neck bent like a question mark. She watched the harbor cranes unload a sailing ship — the cost of coal had revived the Age of Sail, though these particular sails were furled into an intricacy of masts. Men hatless or turbaned wheeled crates on immense carts and dollies; sunlit wagons nursed at shadowed loading bays. She stepped into the shade of the Port Authority building, where the air was thick but faintly cooler.

Jered met her and took the lunch box from her hand. He thanked her in his absent-minded way and said, “Tell Alice I’ll be home for supper. And to set another place.” A tall man in a neat but threadbare uniform stood behind him, his eyes frankly focused on her. Jered finally noticed the stare. “Lieutenant Watson? This is Caroline Law, my niece.”

The gaunt-faced Lieutenant nodded at her. “Miss,” he said gravely.

“Mrs.,” she corrected him.

“Mrs. Law.”

“Lieutenant Watson will be boarding in the back room of the store for a while.”

Caroline thought. Oh, will he? She gave the Lieutenant a more careful look.

“The city barracks is crowded,” Jered said. “We take in boarders occasionally. King and Country and all.”

Not my king, Caroline thought. Not my country.