Issue #164 • Jan. 8, 2015

“Everything Beneath You,” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

“The Metamorphoses of Narcissus,” by Tamara Vardomskaya

Novel Excerpt: Galápagos Regained, by James Morrow

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

EVERYTHING BENEATH YOU

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

        You don’t know me, but I changed the world.

        I have held many names. If I had my choice, I would be known as Zhou, but names cannot be stolen; they must be given, and when your true work is secret it is not easy to be granted the name you deserve. So here I tell this story in the hopes that you, givers of names, weavers of stories, might pin the name to my breast like a badge of honor. And that in doing so, you will also bring my legend into light.

* * *

        ‘Zhou’ means boat. It means rocking on the water with little beneath you, with everything beneath you. I did not always have my ship, my Dragon’s Bane. Once, I lived in a fishing village where others had boats but never me. Women were to cook the food and swell with child and stay away from the water, for we were told that the sea dragons had a particular taste for woman’s flesh. I too had that taste.

        This is a common story. Women who want to be other than woman. For I had a woman’s life hunger but a man’s mouth, and as I grew older I found purchase in men’s company. I was one of them for all but the fishing. Because I would still one day trade my tongue for a child. Because I would be expected not to waste a womb.

        I did not explain correctly, for it is complicated. I did not wish to be a man. What I wished was to be wombless, to never be forced to carry that burden. To not have this empty part inside me waiting to be filled. That is what I wanted. To go out on the water. To have no reason to fear the calming crash of waves.

        Instead I had parents who did not understand but tried their best. My father bought me miniature wooden boats from the time I was a little girl. I displayed them upon my bedroom shelf, and when I brought home girls, which my parents also did not understand and did not ask much of, the girls asked after my collection. They laughed at my explanation: “One day I will have my own.” They did not let my hands cross the skin of their bellies. “You’ll jinx me,” they said. “No touching.” So I touched them elsewhere, and loved them, but never more than the dream that woke me from sleep each night, drenched in salt sweat, smelling of seaweed. The girls beside me held their noses. “You stink,” they said, laughing. “Are you sure you’re not a man? You smell like one.” They teased my neck with their fingertips, pulled me down to them. I did not tell them about the sometimes starfish I found beneath my pillow, about the mornings I woke from dreams so deep my bed was soaked with fishy water.

        The gods unwove my parents from this world when I was twenty, both of them together, one day apart. My mother caught the sickness women often caught; she died in childbirth, her body too weak to bear another daughter. My sister too did not survive. My father followed them across the wall. Other children might have hurt at this, that they were not enough to keep their father alive, but I was glad of their passing, for since I had been old enough to bleed between the legs I had thought to leave upon my twenty-first year and never return. I packed up what little I desired of my parents’ home: two pairs of clothes, my mother’s jade medallion, my father’s tangled fishing net, a single wooden ship. I left in the night, walking the stone path out of town. I did not tell the woman sharing my bed that I was leaving. I did not want to worry her, for she was beautiful and kind and would fare better without her love stretched thin between a husband and a lover.

        I followed the shore until I could not walk any longer. I slept on the beach, the waves licking my skin. I did not worry for dragons; even the young keep to the deep. My clothes were always wet, my skin bloated and wrinkled.

        On my second month of walking, eating only washed-up fish and the sea’s weeds, I woke to a woman panting over me, hands on her hips. Her hair was braided with seaweed, her skin beaded with salty sweat.

        “I have been searching for you,” she said.

        “For me?” I said. “I think you are mistaken.”

        “I am not.” She extended her hand. I took it and pulled myself up. Her fingernails, I realized, were made of seashells. Her braid, I saw, did not end but stretched on and on and on, as far down the beach as I could see. The seaweed grew from her scalp. Her hand in mine was grainy, as though she were made of compacted sand. I stood eye to eye with her. Her eyes were the unearthly blue of the ocean, and like the shoreline, the blue throbbed against the outer limits of her pupil. I let go of her hand.

        “Where did you come from?” I asked, wiping the grainy residue from my hand.

        “Where do you think I came from?”

        I knew, of course; there was only one place she could have come from. “How did you get across the wall?” I asked.

        “When my father was not watching, I climbed it with my bare hands. Then I followed your footsteps.” She gestured back where the ocean had washed all trace of my steps away. As she did so, crabs crawled from the water and arranged themselves in the shape of my prints, scuttling one to the next as I stared. “Your footprints and your smell.”

        Here is what I wanted, then: I wanted to go, but I did not know where I was going. I wanted to stay and rub my hands all over her belly, but I did not like the thought of all that sand in the creases of my palms. I wanted to ask her more questions, about the way the world was made, about death and dreams, but did not want to know the answers, should they distract me from my destined future. Here is what I said, then: “How far did you walk?”

        She waved her hand. “It is not a good question,” she said. “Listen, I have been watching you. I have seen your parents and how you did not leave them until the very end. How kind that was, to put your life on hold. How human.”

        I didn’t correct her. I didn’t tell her about the plan to escape, parents dead or not.

        “I watched you with those women, giving and giving and never taking. Letting them tread on you, so that they might have a moment of happiness, while you had none. I have come here for you. I want what all women want: love, happiness. I want to be yours, forever. I want to live here, on earth, until our end days, and I want you to care for me as you did your parents, though it will be better for you, because I will never die. I will give you everything you have ever wanted.”

        “Everything?” I wanted so much. The sea, a wombless body, a life of my own.

        “You have only to speak it.”

        I knelt into the sand and rummaged through my sack, pulled out the wooden ship, no bigger than my fist.

        “A ship,” I said.

        She snatched it from my palm. “You call me Huan,” she said. “I will make you a ship.”

        She set the toy at the water’s edge. The ocean took it, and as the water touched its wood the ship grew until its prow loomed before us, larger than me, larger than Huan, a great dragon with its mouth hanging wide, forked tongue emerging.

        Huan grabbed my hand. Together we jumped aboard before the ship grew too large for us to climb. I looked out on the blank beach and felt a solid deck where before there had been shifting sand. A home where before there had been no hope of home for miles, for weeks. I gripped the railing’s edge.

        “What now?” I whispered.

        “We ask my sister to weave the wind that will push us to sea,” said Huan. The wind picked up and beat against the front of the ship, the Dragon’s Bane come to life.

        As the ship slid out from shore I turned to Huan. “What do you weave?”

        “I do not weave anything but wool in your world, for I do not have the right loom.”

        “And behind the wall?”

        “What else?” she said. “I weave the sea.”

        The beach disappeared into the distance as we moved toward the horizon. Huan took my hand in hers. “It is time,” she said. “You have promised yourself.”

        That was not what I wanted, but it was what I had promised, she was right. It would not be such a poor trade, forever for all my desires made true. I squeezed her hand. She clamped her nails into my skin. I winced but did not let go. Blood welled up in the jagged nail marks. She let go. My body ached below my belly, the place those other women would not let me touch, and I doubled over from the pain, my knees on my ship’s deck. I felt a pulling in the space between my legs. I grabbed there and found not the vee I had stared at so curiously in the mirror as a child but a knob of flaccid flesh that flopped in my fingers and a thin-skinned sack behind it, much like I had seen on my childhood boy friends when they stripped down on the beach to dive into water I was not allowed to touch. I looked up at Huan; she did not look back at me but instead at the wood grains as though she were studying a pattern.

        “What have you done to me?” I said. I did not say that it was half-good, half-bad, for I did not want to give her any sliver of hope that this was what I had wanted. If to be without womb one must also be without the rest of a woman’s form, then I was not certain that the trade was worth it.

        “It has to be this way,” she said to the floor. “I cannot love a woman. It is forbidden.”

        I wanted to cry but found it difficult. Huan pulled me to my feet. My new body throbbed. She took me into her arms and kissed my lips for the first time. Then she dipped her hands over the ship’s side, and a spray of ocean fountained up into her cupped palm. She brought the palmed water to my lips and bade me drink. I did so; it tasted of rice wine and made me drunk with giddiness. I kissed each of her fingers as she sipped the rest from her palm. She kissed me a second time, and as she pulled back a single red string stretched between our lips, wrapped around my tongue. “Swallow,” she said in garbled speech, her own tongue tied too. I unwrapped the string and swallowed it down my throat. She did the same, and we moved closer as the string coiled in our bellies. At our third kiss, the string dissolved between us and left a red line down the front of both our lips.

        “We are bound,” she said when we parted once more.

        The ocean wine had not left me. I watched the ocean dance upon the ship’s sides. Huan retreated to the stern. I gazed upon her standing there and thought, Maybe I can love you. I twitched under my pants and remembered who I was now. I felt a great drop in my belly like falling. She was beautiful, though, there was no denying that, and the water, too, more beautiful than anything I had laid eyes on. What had I lost to get here? I no longer knew.

        Hours later Huan met me in the moonlight, stripped bare of her elaborate dressings. She unpeeled me, and I stood naked and ashamed of my new body until she ran her hands down the length of my spine. I felt the surge of blood that gave me a confident strength. We made love on the deck, with Huan astride my waist, and as I came inside her I felt through my body spasm an electric jolt like nothing I had ever felt. Huan pinched the skin around me until I was ready once more and moved until she too screamed into the night air. I never knew one so unearthly could make so human a noise. I held her as she shook back to herself.

        It was not easy to see how this would end. It was not easy to feel glad at earning two of my life’s dreams in one day. Would I ever not want, would I ever be full? There was no womb in my body, but still there was an empty space I longed to fill.

* * *

        When I asked Huan about the danger of dragons, she laughed the throaty laugh of one with power.

        “Do not worry about dragons,” she said. “They are not drawn to women. And even if they were, do you see a woman aboard this ship?” She cupped her breasts. “I may look like a woman, but a dragon is no match for me.”

        Huan told me other things, other truths, other stories. She told me of her six weaver sisters, how they had encouraged her to go when they saw how heartsick she had become. They did not laugh at her love of a human. They did not tell their father. They helped her cross the wall and come to me.

        “Don’t they miss you?” I asked her.

        “No,” said Huan. Her seashell fingernails snuck up my legs, cutting the skin as they passed. “My sisters have their weaving to keep them busy. They weave the wind and the sky and even the birds.” Huan peered at the sky, right into the sun. “Those birds, there,” she said, pointing to a patch of black moving in shadow against the light. “She is watching over us. You have nothing to fear with me, my wife-husband.”

        I did not fear with her. I did not think about sea dragons or death or even much about the body I had lost, though still I did not feel as though I were myself. My fingers itched for Huan’s skin when she was not beneath them. I gripped the ship’s stern when I could not hold her for her sleeping. I gripped my new body until she woke and called to me. I loved her stories and fell asleep dreaming of her world behind her wall.

        Unlike the other women, she let me touch her belly. Unlike the other women, she did not ask me if I loved her. Then one day she squinted at the sun and frowned. We had been lying across the deck, watching the blue pass us by. She sat up and searched frantic about the clouds.

        I shook myself awake. How long had it been since we’d been one? I ran my hand down my beard, which seemed to have grown overnight past my navel.

        “What’s the matter?” I asked.

        “The birds,” she said.

        “I don’t see any birds.”

        The way she looked at me, one would think there would never be birds again.

        She cupped my face in her palm. “No matter what,” she said, “come find me.”

        A crash of thunder cracked the sky and split the ship in half. Splinters showered the water. Huan was gone.

        I clung to the ship’s corpse as long as I was able, but it sank fast into the sea. I grabbed hold of a plank of wood, the last remnant of my beautiful ship, and tried to slow my breathing so that I would not choke. I searched the water but did not find her. A great pain struck my belly, and I stilled as my body changed again, from man to woman, the flesh between my legs receding.

        “Never again will you steal one of my daughters,” said a voice of nowhere, no one. It was the squeak of shattered wood planks against one another making words that sounded human. It was the crash of far-off waves upon a far-off shore. “I’ll watch you drown where the sea dragons will feast upon your bloated body.”

        What I worried of in that moment: that Huan was wrong about the sea-dragons, that I would drown, that I would die, and all that I had not said to her would go down with me, buried at the sea’s bottom, that I loved her, that she was my sea.

* * *

        I did not drown or die. I wept all the water out of my body, and when it was gone I floated in wait for death to wrap its crooked fingers around my throat. Instead I woke like a beached whale, belly-up in the sand, with a sea-dragon breathing down my throat.

        “Don’t eat me!” I cried upon waking.

        “Eat you?” The dragon huffed salt spray down onto me; it stuck to my skin like mucous. “You’re thin as dry muscle. You’re the least appetizing thing I’ve ever seen, though your smell,” it said, pressing its nose against my cheeks, “is intoxicating.”

        “You are drawn to women,” I said. “Huan was wrong.”

        “Women?” The dragon slunk back into the surf, wetting its back. “What is women? I am drawn to those wet things down your cheeks. I am drawn to the gut empty feeling in your stomach. I am drawn to the denial of your desires.”

        I remembered the women who lay across the sheets of my bed, their night whimpers, how they did not allow me to touch them across the belly, where their future lived. Some of them wanted that future. Others did not, I am certain.

        “Did you save me?” I asked.

        The dragon blew more spray upon me. “I could not let you drown. Those that drown smell of the sea.”

        The dragon’s back was broad and expansive, a landscape stretching into the ocean: a deck, the dragon’s rows of spikes lining both sides like a railing.

        “Will you save me again?” I said, imagining myself even then as Zhou, the rider of sea dragons. Only a creature great as this could ferry me to the wall, where I would beg for Huan’s hand once again, only this time as myself. I would ask her to remove the womb, and nothing more; there was no more space in this world for the old who spouted lies like the dragon spouted ocean. We were daughters, and we would take what we wanted and give back the rest.

* * *

        The dragon told me this: that it would ferry me until I gained back my desire. That it would be difficult for it to leave until I was satiated. That it would not carry me forever but would carry me for a little while.

        “Fair enough,” I said. “Take me to the wall.” I climbed aboard its back.

        The sea we rode upon was not the same sea; purple light danced across the sky each evening, and soon after setting sail I glimpsed in the distance strange little ships off to our sides. The sea appeared as we sailed; to look too far into the distance was to look into nothing. The little ships, we came to know, were giant swallows, and they sailed to either side of us, a flock of them, leading our way forward. I watched them glide across the otherwise-still ocean and listened to them twitter to one another each morning, speaking their secret language. I remembered the birds in my other journeys, and I knew that Huan’s sisters were watching over us. I saw the sea unfold and knew that it was Huan who weaved it, that she still loved me.

        The dragon demanded nothing more from me than that I cry upon its skin each night. I did my best, but soon I was too dry for tears. I became thin as paper, until I was paper pressed against my dragon ship’s sides. I had to unpeel myself from its edges to move across the bright blue skin.

        The sky grew lighter as we grew closer, until it was only purple, untouched canvas, unwoven. The wall came into view. We reached it in three days. It was high and made of jade. As the dragon crawled to shore, my stomach tightened. How would I climb a wall so high? The sparrows circled me until I realized; they were meant to lead me over.

        “Goodbye, dragon,” I said, letting it bury its face once more in the stink of my clothes.

        “Your sorrow is lighter already,” said the dragon. “I am both happy and sad.”

        I climbed a sparrow’s back and grabbed tight to its feathers. I looked down upon the sea glistening blue and white and black; my body called out to return to it. The air was too dry. But there was no going back, not without Huan.

        On the other side of the wall massive trees stretched into an endless white sky, their leaves made of gold bells that rang in a soft wind. The trees did not stay in one spot, as trees did in our world, but moved with me, their roots sliding along the ground. They swatted at us with crooked branches. I clutched at the swallow’s feathers as she jerked to miss them. Finally we came to an area free of trees, where instead wooden pavilions as tall as the trees swayed in silver light. Inside the open-sided pavilions we passed up-close, weavers and other creatures slept standing up, leaning against the beams.

        The sparrow slowed and descended onto a carpet of red moss that stretched below us. I climbed off its back and stood looking up and down the rows of buildings so tall I could not see the tops from the ground, wondering where to go. I did not have to wonder long, for from one of the pavilions stepped a giant man-god in bright red robes that I realized formed the moss at our feet. His eyes were wooden and creaked as they moved. He was this place, and so I knew that he must be the king.

        “Climb,” he said, and he grabbed hold of the white beard that reached to his shins and shook.

        “What?” I said, shrinking back from his booming voice.

        “I expect you have come here to talk, and so I am telling you to climb, so that we might be face to face and can speak like two who are equal.” I grabbed hold of the beard and began to climb. He lifted the beard once I was halfway up, plucked me from his hairs, and sat me on his shoulder. “Though we are not equals at all,” he said. “We will never be equals, as I am sure you know. Why have you come to me?”

        “Your daughter,” I said, holding a strip of his robe so that I would not fall. “I want to be with her.”

        “You have come a long way,” he said. “And you do smell like a man, it is true. You have been at sea. You have much in common with men. But you did not want to be a man when my daughter made you so. You are a man no longer, and your marriage is revoked. Should you go back to being a man, your marriage would be restored.”

        “I can’t do that,” I said, for I knew that I would not be happy. I would have his daughter’s love, but what of my own love? Was there a reason he could not give me everything I wanted? He was tall, and loud, and weaved the world. He weaved us into being. I could hardly speak I was so angry. Why wouldn’t he just give us all we wanted?

        “Yes, you humans cling to what power you have. You want more than you deserve. Fine. I am impressed by how far you have come. I will not make you leave without reward. I give you two choices, then. Your first: you may have all that you ever wanted. You may keep your womanness, your womb. You may be with my daughter as you are. You may have another ship with which to sail the seas.”

        I could taste it, the satisfaction of all my life’s dreams met, like salt water on my tongue.

        “Or, your second choice, you can give it to all of your kind. You cannot have my daughter’s hand but can instead gift choice to others, to all of your humanity. I will make this man-woman power malleable. I will give you control of what you are. I will give you all blank slates to work with as you please.”

        It was not a fair choice, to pit my desires against those of my fellow people, against those of the women I heard cry at night, who could never be with me forever always, the way some of them wanted. I would be lying if I said I did not want both things but wanted the first more. My belly ached with the weight of this decision. How dare he.

        But one cannot change all the world in one day. One cannot take all the power at once. I would do what I could. I would give up Huan, beautiful Huan, who must be waiting for me, who had asked me to come for her, who I would never see again, to give my people their own power.

        “You know what my choice is,” I said.

        “I knew,” he said, “that you were a fool when I saw you riding your dragon to meet me.”

        “Can I see Huan?” I said. “One more time? Can I see her?”

        “It will upset her,” he said. “You have chosen your people over her. I cannot be sure that she will forgive you that. No, I think it best you leave the way you came.” He picked me up with his too-large fingers and dropped me upon the swallow’s back. “I hope you enjoy the complicated nature of the world you wrought. I made things simple for a reason, you know.” The swallow lifted into the air. I was grateful that I could no longer see him, though I could still hear his calls. “You will regret the ambiguity. You will regret the confusion. Things will not be as you think they will.”

        When we reached the wall, his voice disappeared, and I sunk my face into the bird’s back and screamed out Huan’s name.

* * *

        My new Dragon’s Bane was waiting for me. The smell of my sadness, it said, was impossible to ignore. I did not go back to my homeland to check on the women there; those I met across the sea told me stories, of the confusion, of women making themselves men making themselves women again. Of in-between people. Of people of neither. I was no longer part of that world. Maybe I never had been.

        The sea brought me to you all, though neither I nor my ship led the way. We sailed on waves unfolding before us and washed up on your shore. You who bestow legends. You who weave stories into the world. I ask you for my name. I ask you for a legend never-changing, where Huan and I may be together in story if not in life. This is what I believe she wants, why she wove the sea to take me here.

        Give us this, please. A story that ends in happiness, a story of love. Give me a name that suits me.

Copyright © 2015 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

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Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Interzone. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth, profiled in the March/April 2014 issue of Poets & Writers. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE METAMORPHOSES OF NARCISSUS

by Tamara Vardomskaya

        I lay on the drowned grand piano, naked, my head that of a chess-horse, my hands and feet stumps oozing black-green blood onto the keys.

        “Beautiful!” the voice I knew so well thundered above me. “Beautiful! Come here, Oinhoa, I am sheer genius.”

        “Isn’t she... uncomfortable?” a gentler contralto responded.

        “Why would that matter?”

        And it didn’t matter. This was not my blood; it was but part of glamorous transfiguration. I was beautiful, or I believed I was. What did it matter, the beauty a woman was born with, my long fair hair that was now a wooden horse’s mane, my hands and feet that had once moved in the dance so skillfully? Beauty was a construction, a blueprint geniuses dictate to mere mortals who could not know for themselves what it meant.

        I had come to the Royal Conservatory of Halispell as a mere girl from the border provinces with a talent for dancing, with the faint hope of finding a genius mentor and inspiring him—it was undoubtedly a ‘he’—to re-shape me, to transfigure me, into something other than the raw material of a Hestland village girl.

        Fool that I was, I had thought the mentoring would be in dance.

        The woman who had stood in a corner near the stage and watched me dance at my first year-end recital had seemed nothing extraordinary. Her simple pale-blue dress made her merely a splash of color from the stage, something to spot on when I spun, my head always returning to that splash to keep from losing balance and orientation. After the recital, when I was basking in the applause—not as much as for the true stars of the class, I knew; I was at the time a second-rank dancer, and I nurtured the hope of a mentor to send me to the first ranks—when she approached me, the face above the blue dress was plain, lacking classical features, and she moved like one untrained, her posture that of a pine tree among the slender palms that were my fellow dancers.

        “I am Oinhoa,” she said, and the name triggered a vague familiarity. “You danced beautifully, and you have a beautiful body. My husband wishes to speak to you. Would you join us at the Butterfly for a glass of wine tonight?”

        The Butterfly Lounge was a bit far from my lodging, and more dear than my student stipend’s means. She must have spotted my quickly-masked dread. “It will be on us, of course. My husband is very interested.”

        “Who is your husband?” I asked, and immediately felt like an ignorant provincial at her look of surprise.

        “You’ve heard of Avardi, I’m sure? The....” still smiling, she seemed to search for an adequate word, and finally settled on “...artist?”

        And now only focusing on her blue dress once more kept me from losing balance and orientation. Every man and woman at the Conservatory read Arts Today, and Avardi’s face was on this month’s cover in full glamour, shifting from himself to the breathtaking transfigurations he wrought. Here was a man who knew no veneration or limits, who proudly declared that he would not just challenge but annihilate the fossilizing artistic traditions. We girls had quickly passed the magazine around in the dressing room, whispering at the dynamic-captures, before the dance artistic director, gracefully withered as a century-old lemon tree, furiously confiscated it.

        But even before I had seen any of his art, I had read the old men in the monochrome papers railing that the moral fiber of our youths would be destroyed by this Avardi-ism; he had replied with “Moral Fiber,” a mocking composition of oat bran, excrement, and naked models that even Arts Today had not dared to print a picture of, but we all wanted to see.

        He had his choice of models, of performers in his static and dynamic transfigurations, the girls had whispered; he could choose the best. So this was his muse, the woman who had left the richest man in Europa for him, whom he adored such that he signed his own works, “Oinhoa-Avardi,” taking her name with his.

        The taxicab slowed before the fire-opal facade of the Butterfly, but my heart and stomach kept going faster. My only presentable dress, a simple black one, seemed all the more drab in these glittering lights, and I imagined that perspiration that my lightning-fast sponge bath had missed was still painting the crevices of my skin. In the few seconds I had before I had to follow the cool, confident Oinhoa out of the cab, I surreptitiously rubbed my calves because I’d had no time for a proper cooldown. Who was I, a dancer good enough to be accepted to the Royal Conservatory, good enough to have small solos, but clearly not among those destined for stardom? I had heard my teachers comment that I might make it as a corps dancer, fated to transform into one of a faceless mass with one objective: to be the same as all others.

        As all other details of the inside of the Butterfly Lounge turned into a faceless mass in my mind when at the corner table I saw Avardi himself, real to the last hair.

        If a small corner of my mind did note that he was shorter than I had imagined, and his voice was overly loud and had an unpleasant grating edge, the rest of me overrode that. His costume, a robe from an Eastern priest of three hundred years ago, the pantaloons of a Caltavan lord from four hundred, and shoes of crystal and paper from the imagined far distant future, clashed defiantly with the Butterfly’s aristocratic decor and decorum. I remember little of what actually happened that evening, except how seahorses and crab claws had sprouted out of Oinhoa’s dress and my own, how the wine had flowed like blood and my body wanted to dance to its pulse more than to the music, and how my heart had raced, wanting to itself break free of chrysalis and spread wings into the wind.

        I could not sleep that night and was late to rehearsal, the first of many I was late to before I started missing them altogether. What did it matter, the endless practicing of stag leaps and wolf spins and peacock poses to the tinkling of a grand piano, when I had been the stag and the wolf and the peacock and the grand piano, had been them at the bottom of the sea and in midden heaps and in rivers of cheese and when kissing a basilisk and an icosahedron while hanging by my ribcage from the pendulum of a clock? In contrast with the color of the Avardi studios, of the sea cliffs and the city ports where he created his transfigurations, with the flashing of capture-bulbs from the swarming journalists of the arts and culture worlds, the Conservatory where before I had so yearned to merit dissolving into the corps was grey and drab and empty. One would call it a soulless land of machines, but I knew what soul Avardi could breathe into machines. It was the old putrefying art of choreography, representing the hollow rotten legacy of the centuries, and exactly what Avardi fought against.

        And so I got my stipend suspended, and then myself expelled, for the Royal Conservatory of Halispell had no space even in its corps for dancers who did not deign to learn the choreography. I slept now in a corner of Avardi’s studio, thinking my blanket on the floor superior to the entire room I previously had. I would spend the time when he wasn’t transfiguring me holding the tools for his series of transfigurational portraits of Nimrod, the new president of Caltava. This new head of state had not yet joined the others in paying his respects, but his genius at social transformation in his country, razing ancient mansions to raise new towering public buildings and erasing hereditary classes to affirm a meritocracy for all Caltavans, fascinated Avardi as akin to his own genius at transfigurational art; he even dropped hints of perhaps going to Caltava himself.

        There was no shame in expulsion, Oinhoa told me quietly, herself ensuring that there was enough food left from their meals for me. Avardi himself had been expelled from the Academy of Arts when he was younger, and from the Transfigurationists’ Guild a few years ago, soon after his first cover of Arts Today.

        She did not say why, and I did not ask. I knew it was because the Academy’s and Guild’s minds had been lead-sealed as coffins against his new Art. Now he was on the covers of Arts Today and with kings and presidents and dynamic-picture magnates queuing to shake his hand, and where were they? I was right to expel myself from that cocoon.

        Now, in front of the arts critics whom the first-rank girls in my classes would have tied themselves into double knots to dance for, I stood, smiling, motionless in full arabesque, wearing nothing but a bandage binding my breasts, while Avardi explained to them that breasts can be detached from the concept of beauty, a woman without breasts, see, was still as beautiful. I would smile, my muscles taut as for a dance, still always keeping my eyes on Oinhoa’s simple colored dresses, so as not to lose my balance and orientation.

        The critics, though, seemed inattentive that evening, in the grand hall with the gurgling chocolate fountain; the roast pig, apple in its mouth as customary, seemed the only eye that met mine. Avardi was unveiling to them his new project, an exploration of beauty, a ripping of it apart and reassembling in a whole new way for this new world. “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” it was called, after the ancient transfiguration of that beautiful hero. There had been many other projects of his, he declaimed in his crowd-cutting glass-shaking voice, tying to that period of history before humans learned to control transfiguration: Actaeon turning into a stag (I had been that stag), and Daphne into a laurel tree (I had been that laurel tree), and Io becoming a cow (that project had used another model, which made me sick with envy as he brought it up, yet I kept smiling). But the metamorphosis of Narcissus was one particularly dear to his heart. “For am I not a narcissist myself?”

        Yet for once, the big men and women in their suits and ties and dresses transfigured in order to grow the currently fashionable lilies were not fascinated by his glamour, or my beauty. Perhaps the lack of breasts does change a woman for the worse, but it was not a more beautiful woman they looked at, nor even at their wine and untouched chocolate and roast pig.

        Instead, they kept glancing towards the doors, their eyes following the messengers who would glide in, trying to be unobtrusive, and hand Hyacinthus Rudaikins, the editor-in-chief of Arts Today, a small note with the farwriting office stamp. I had rarely seen guests receive messages during such events before, and I could not recall ever seeing the guests unfold the messages immediately. But Rudaikins’s taut posture seemed to defy anyone who would dare censure him for breach of etiquette.

        My curiosity was cracking through my identity as a work of art. Instead of looking at Oinhoa’s dress I looked at the farwriting forms, each one trembling more than the last in Hyacinthus’s large hands.

        “It is a work that at last breaks the shell of being human, of being material,” Avardi thundered, for the first time audibly straining to regain the centre of attention, “and strips away our limitations, makes us one with Art. Makes us one with Art!” he repeated. “Makes us....”

        Hyacinthus threw down the last note, the hasty scribble on it ending in a blotch of ink. “Ladies and gentlemen. Nimrod has just invaded Hestland.” The editor-in-chief seemed not to need any effort at all to suddenly drown out the artist’s cry, even in as terrifyingly calm a voice as he had then, flat and still as the water reflecting Narcissus, and as uncaring. “Fifteen villages have been air-bombed in the last hour. There may be three thousand people dead.”

        I tried to stay focused on Oinhoa’s splash of pale blue, to stay Art, not a shell-bound, limited human.

        “Tanks are rolling towards Halispell. We are at war.”

* * *

        My parents were killed in the first bombing of the invasion. After I had barely written to them in the past year, brief and vague, never mentioning Avardi. I sobbed helplessly as I re-read my mother’s last letter from the week before, she still so blithely convinced that I was becoming a dancing star. She died never knowing that her daughter had lain naked in front of a genius, with the full complicity of his wife. (Though we had never touched each other. My adoration of him was something beyond sex, and he would no sooner carnally desire me than he would a block of wood or marble.)

        Perhaps it was better that way. I do not know.

        Avardi’s home and studio, and he himself, were commandeered by the War Office. He was sent away to apply the art of transfiguration to hide potential targets from the bombers. I could prove no connection to him or Oinhoa that would let me follow them, and I did not have the spirits to try.

        I volunteered as a nurse, as one way to prove myself useful. My hands were still clever and my back still strong. I took the too-quick course of training, easily: bandaging I knew from winding dancing shoe ribbons, stitching up wounds from the sewing my mother taught, and as for preparing patients for transfigurational surgery, few could match my expertise in that from the patient’s perspective.

        I made my patients comfortable, because I knew how they felt.

        And so six months into the war I found myself in what had once been a town, transfigured into bombed ruins, and into our mobile hospital they brought him in on a stretcher. A young man, round plain face that reminded me of Oinhoa, now nearly bloodless with shock, both of his feet stumps oozing blood as mine had been that day on the drowned grand piano. Only this time the blood was red and real and his.

        Dancers do not like to look at those with crippled feet; it arouses too primal a fear. In Halispell, I would avert my eyes from a beggar on the street with crutches, or from the characteristic limp of those whom only wooden transfigured prostheses allowed to stand again.

        I had changed. I had bandaged enough horrible injuries before; I had learned to look at them, even at the feet. Yet this time as I dressed his stumps for the surgery, I found myself looking at his eyes instead, his clear blue eyes laughing even as he gritted back the pain.

        “I hope the new feet they give me have nicer toes,” he joked. “I had mighty ugly toes.”

        “Beauty is a construction,” I replied, unable to suppress a smile as my voice sounded so different saying these words, “to be dictated by geniuses to the mortals who do not understand what it means.”

        “Does that mean, sister, that if you call me beautiful I will be?” he asked with a sudden chuckle, and then gripped the side of the camp bed as the laughter brought on another wave of pain.

        “Does that make me a genius?” I was more eager to distract him than truly thinking about it.

        “That, and beautiful too,” he replied as soon as he could get the hiss of pain through gritted teeth. “If saying so dictates it, I name myself a genius and dictate it. Avardi can name himself a genius, why not me?”

        I had already heard many men call me beautiful and profess love; they tended to, when I’d saved their lives. I had not taken it seriously before, but this time, something made me keep returning to him after the surgery whenever I could be spared. To say his name, Ceyx, and support him in the nights when he would get out of bed and try to walk on his replacement feet that will never again let him dance, not even when he held me and we tried to dance together. Transfiguration could do many beautiful things, but it could never replace the original.

        We married an hour after his discharge. It was war, and he would be evacuated as a decorated invalid; I was the one risking death, and we did not put things off. But we both survived the next three years, seeing each other when possible, writing when not. I never again postponed writing a reply letter.

        When my tour of duty ended with the war, I returned to my husband in the now-liberated Halispell. I took him to see the Conservatory that had been hit in the last bombing raid before liberation, the wing with the rehearsal rooms caved in, the floors on which I had furthered my ambition now buried beneath charred rubble. They would be rebuilt, the Queen and city government vowed. We would take the students back. I knew, holding Ceyx’s hand, that even if the record of my expulsion had burned with the rest in the firestorm, I would not go back.

        Avardi’s studios that I remembered were completely gone. The newspapers said that much of the art collection survived, as it had already been moved and the studios used as a temporary hospital when the bomb had hit them. The art had escaped the shrapnel; the people had not.

        The Butterfly Lounge had avoided all the air raids unscathed, belying its fragile appearance. We entered, and I saw him at the corner table where once my dress had sprouted crab claws. Avardi. His hair gray now, the famous piercing eyes dimmer, yet they lit with recognition at my face.

        “Oinhoa!” he cried out, though, not my name, and I realized that I had never heard him say my name. He may never have bothered to know it.

        “Where is Oinhoa?” I asked, reluctant to move from my husband to this man. The long days and nights when I had pined for him terribly now seemed strangely drained of color and meaningless.

        “Nimrod’s brutes killed her.” Avardi’s voice was flat as Hyacinthus’s voice had been, in a litany he must have repeated many times. “During the occupation. Caught her carrying ‘The Metamorphoses III’ out. Stood her against the wall and shot her in the head. And set fire to the work.”

        The bartender set down the glass he was polishing to respect the silence that stretched between us.

        “Come,” Avardi said at last. “With you, I can make ‘The Metamorphoses IV.’”

        “Do you even know my name?” I said, shuddering.

        “I weep for Oinhoa.” It was as if he didn’t hear me. “But with the Metamorphoses, we can....”

        I put my shoulder under Ceyx’s and helped him turn, matching my dancer’s walk to his irregular strides as we walked away. Outside, the sunlight turned the crystals in the rubble into a thousand dancing rainbows, like the shimmer on a butterfly’s wings, like a transfigured creature about to be born anew.

Copyright © 2015 Tamara Vardomskaya

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Tamara Vardomskaya is a Canadian writer and a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D in theoretical linguistics at the University of Chicago.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

NOVEL EXCERPT: GALÁPAGOS REGAINED

by James Morrow

Galápagos Regained, the long anticipated historical epic from F/SF satirist James Morrow, is out this week from St. Martin’s Press. Dramatizing the coming of the Darwinian worldview, Morrow’s loopy saga centers on the irrepressible Chloe Bathurst, a marginally popular Victorian actress who, due to her outspoken political views, loses her job in the spring of 1848 and must seek employment elsewhere.

        In Chapter Two, presented here for the pleasure and amusement of Beneath Ceaseless Skies readers, we witness Chloe entering the sphere of the illustrious Charles Darwin (an eminent personage even before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859). We also become privy to the Great God Contest: an outrageous theological competition that will ultimately send our heroine on a madcap journey across the Atlantic Ocean, up the Amazon River, over the Andes Mountains, and along the Humboldt Current to the Galápagos Archipelago.

* * *

CHAPTER 2

CHLOE FINDS EMPLOYMENT ON THE ESTATE OF CHARLES DARWIN, TO THE BENEFIT OF CERTAIN GIANT TORTOISES, EXOTIC IGUANAS, AND RARE BIRDS

        When Chloe first clamped eyes on a Times advertisement indicating that on Sunday afternoon, between the hours of noon and four, a Mrs. Charles Darwin would be entertaining prospective governesses at her husband’s estate in Down, County Kent, she decided to ignore it, having no reason to imagine the meeting should go better than the forty previous such interviews. But then she noticed the final line, SYMPATHY WITH EDUCATIONAL THEORIES OF M. ROUSSEAU DESIRABLE, and her hopes soared, for she’d once auditioned for the part of Sophie in an adaptation of the philosopher’s most acclaimed novel.

        On the evidence of Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau seemed to believe that amongst every child’s instincts were compassion, curiosity, and a love of adventure. The tutor’s job was to nurture these virtues, forswearing all forms of coercion and restraint. Very well, thought Chloe, if it’s amity Mrs. Darwin wants, I’ll become the most genial governess ever to draw breath in Britain. If freedom is the order of the day, I’ll let her offspring run wild as South Seas savages.

        Although her liquidity was at low tide—shake her purse, and you would hear naught but a single farthing clink against a bereaved ha’penny—Chloe straightaway secured the steam train fare in the form of yet another loan from Fanny. Upon arriving at Bromley Station (so ran Chloe’s scheme) she would spare herself the hackney-coach fee by donning her calfskin boots, hoisting her parasol against the afternoon sun, and walking all five miles to Down Village, where she would change into her best clogs prior to the interview. A well-laid plan, to be sure, which proceeded to go spectacularly awry. Detraining, Chloe was thrown off balance by her portmanteau, accidentally wedging her foot between the last step and the station platform, thereby wrenching her ankle. The pain was implacable—knife-sharp when she moved at a normal pace, spasmodic when she shuffled—and, worse yet, a storm now arose, so she was obliged to trek through a downpour against which her little parapluie proved useless. At five o’clock she presented herself at the estate in the sorriest of conditions: cold, wet, muddy, exhausted—and one hour late.

        Mrs. Darwin behaved with exemplary graciousness. Ignoring the raindrops cascading from Chloe’s bonnet and sleeves, she ushered her into the drawing-room, a commodious space boasting a bay window offering a panorama of sodden pastureland punctuated by mulberry trees and a Spanish chestnut. Mrs. Darwin proposed to serve her visitor a cup of chamomile. Given her half-frozen state, this offer delighted Chloe, though she accepted it with a studied restraint that she imagined bespoke refinement.

        “I apologize for my tardiness,” she said. “Alas, at some point during my railway journey, my purse fell prey to a pickpocket,” she added (knowing that the truth might suggest an inveterate clumsiness), “and so I couldn’t hire a fly. If you and Mr. Darwin are about to have supper, I shall gladly wait here.”

        “A pickpocket, Miss Bathurst?” said Mrs. Darwin. “Oh, dear.” She was a sweet-faced woman whose notable aspects included extravagant brown curls, pink cheeks, a pouty lower lip, and a pregnancy of perhaps six months’ duration. “Mr. Darwin and I should be pleased to put you up and provide for your return to London.”

        “Am I to infer the other candidates have come and gone?”

        “One stayed behind, a Miss Catherine Thorley, to whom I awarded the situation ninety minutes ere you arrived.”

        So often had Chloe’s profession required her to sob on cue, she’d forgotten how it felt to weep spontaneously, but now such an episode was upon her, muffled cries breaking from her throat, fat tears welling in her eyes. Mrs. Darwin relieved Chloe of her cup and saucer, then placed a tender hand on her shoulder.

        “I shall write to you the instant I learn that one of my relations requires a governess,” said Mrs. Darwin.

        As if summoned by the din of Chloe’s despair, a tall gentleman strode into the room bearing a terra-cotta flowerpot covered with a pie plate, his confident carriage marking him as master of the house. Beetle-browed and side-whiskered, with a nose suggesting a small but assertive potato, he was far from handsome, though Chloe found him attractive nonetheless—physically magnetic and also, by the evidence of his kind eyes and warm smile, a person of abiding benevolence.

        “There, there, my dear,” he said, observing her tears, “it can’t be as bad as all that,” a banality last spoken to Chloe by her gladiator lover in The Last Days of Pompeii. As articulated by Mr. Darwin, the platitude acquired a certain profundity—and he was right, she decided: it wasn’t as bad as all that. “If you like,” he continued, setting the flowerpot on the piano stool, “I shall lend you a pound or two till you find employment elsewhere.”

        “I fear I’ve run short of elsewheres, sir,” said Chloe. “My peers in the theatre have spurned me, and yours is the twenty-first household where I shan’t become governess.”

        “Miss Bathurst, meet Mr. Darwin, the county’s most celebrated naturalist and geologist,” said the mistress of Down House. “Charles, this is Miss Bathurst.”

        “Charmed,” said Mr. Darwin, then snapped his fingers so emphatically that Chloe half-expected to see a spark. “I have an idea. Tonight, Miss Bathurst, you will sleep in the guest room.”

        “The servants’ quarters,” Mrs. Darwin corrected him.

        “The servants’ quarters,” he agreed. “After you awaken, exit by way of the veranda, then proceed to the vegetable garden and thence to the rear gate. You will find me up and about, rambling through the thicket and pondering some scientific problem or other. Before our stroll is done I shall have made my proposal, and you will have given me your answer.”

        “Good heavens, Charles,” said Mrs. Darwin, pursing her lips in mock exasperation, “it sounds as if you mean to ask for our visitor’s hand in marriage.”

        “When a man has so marvelous a creature as you for a wife,” said Mr. Darwin, “he requires no additional brides. You are a harem unto yourself.”

        Mrs. Darwin blushed and lowered her head. Her husband issued an affectionate laugh. These people, Chloe surmised, took every imaginable pleasure in each another. Happiness was a hobby that she, too, hoped to pursue one day, but for now she must attend to more practical matters.

        Mr. Darwin removed the pie plate from the flowerpot and pointed into the cavity. “Annelids,” he announced.

        “Earthworms, Mr. Darwin?” muttered his wife in a world-weary tone, as if crawlers on the piano stool were but one amongst many oddities that accrued to her husband’s profession.

        Saying nothing, he flipped back the piano lid. Gaze fixed intently on his worms, he struck the keys with both fists, filling the room with a distressing discordance. “Once again, they make no response.” He assaulted the keys a second time. “Not a wriggle, not a tremor, not a twitch. Yesterday they ignored Master Willy’s flute, the day before that Miss Annie’s tin whistle.”

        “Our firstborn son and elder daughter,” Mrs. Darwin explained.

        “I daresay, I’ve all but proved that earthworms are deaf.”

        “My goodness, that finding must be as significant as Mr. Newton’s universal gravitation—am I right, dear?” said Mrs. Darwin, her lips assuming a wry curve.

        “How blithely we underestimate the humble earthworm,” Mr. Darwin persisted. “Were it not for this species’s contributions to soil formation, agriculture would be at a standstill throughout the Empire and the rest of the world.”

        Mrs. Darwin now summoned a willowy domestic named Mary, instructing her to find accommodation for Miss Bathurst. The servant bobbed her head deferentially, then guided her charge along a candlelit hall hung with pastoral landscapes, Chloe limping as inconspicuously as her ankle permitted. Suddenly a rambunctious band of children came spilling down the stairs. They brushed past Chloe and marched towards the drawing-room with its earthworms and its doting parents. The tall, serious boy was surely Master William (studiously ignoring his little brother), while the taller, giggling girl was certainly Miss Annie (casting a protective eye on a toddling sister). Near the end of the parade marched a young woman cradling a babe to her bosom, a nursemaid, no doubt, followed by a second lass holding a chalkboard on which she’d written, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” the capital letter A in “Adam” rendered in boldface, the lower-case a in “all” likewise enhanced.

        For a fleeting instant Chloe endeavored to despise Miss Catherine Thorley, this person to whom she’d lost the coveted post. Her nemesis had at best eighteen years, exuded an air of rusticity, and evinced no obvious competence to cultivate Rousseauian curiosity in young minds. But then a sudden generosity took hold of Chloe, and she bestowed a smile on Miss Thorley, who smiled back. Blighted by workhouses, crippled by Parliamentary inertia, torn by Chartist unrest, the British nation in 1848 was not exactly Heaven on Earth—and yet by Chloe’s lights Mother Albion always had certain perennial virtues on display, not the least of which was governesses for whom even Adam’s lapse from grace could be turned to pedagogical advantage.

* * *

        Hopes aloft, senses alive to the melodious larks and sun-soaked sky, Chloe stepped off the veranda and entered the grassy, clover-dotted back lawn of Down House, hobbling past an oval flowerbed bursting with lilies and larkspur. Her ankle felt better, and she moved at a sprightly pace to the brick-walled vegetable garden. Gimping quickly through the arched entrance, she sauntered amidst patches of turnips, rhubarb, and runner beans, then lifted the rear-gate latch and crossed into the wild environs beyond.

        True to his prediction, Mr. Darwin had reached the thicket ahead of her. “Welcome to my sandwalk,” he said, indicating a path of pulverized flint mottled along its entire course with medallions of sunlight, flanked on one side by a tangled woodland and on the other by a vacant field. “I laid it out myself, an ellipse fit for every sort of rumination.”

        She drew abreast of the scientist, and they proceeded towards a cottage located at the far swerve of the path, Mr. Darwin smoking a cigarette whilst propelling himself forward with his walking-stick. “Down to business,” he said. “Beyond the invertebrates whose deafness I demonstrated yesterday, other species occupy these premises, and they all require care and feeding.”

        Chloe cringed. A sour curd congealed in her stomach. She could imagine cultivating Mr. Darwin’s roses or whitewashing the walls of his villa, but she had no desire to become his goose girl, milkmaid, or resident shepherdess. “I grew up in the streets of Wapping. I am ignorant of farm animals.”

        “The creatures to whom I allude know nothing of farms.”

        He guided her off the sandwalk, past a copse of birch and alder, and from there to a meadow dominated by a fantastical building suggesting an immense hoop-skirt frame. The thing was easily as large as the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, its circular windows arrayed like portholes on a ship, while an exoskeleton of iron girders arced heavenward to support a gleaming glass vault.

        “My zoological garden,” Mr. Darwin explained, directing Chloe towards a riveted bronze door, evidently the only entrance.

        Stepping into the strange edifice, she heard a chorus of tweets and chirps, even as she beheld a tableau of golden sunflowers and blossoming vines. Her nose, meanwhile, admitted fragrances so numerous and heady—cloying, piquant, tart, lemony, rank—she seemed to be inhaling the olfactory essence of Creation itself. “An aviary, is that what you call it?” she asked, noting the little birds perching on the vines, pecking at the sunflowers, and swooping across the crystalline ceiling.

        “A more accurate term would be ‘vivarium.’ This dome is an aviary, herpetorium, and arboretum, all in one.”

        “Herpetorium?”

        “Here be dragons.” Mr. Darwin drew her attention to a sector jammed with granite boulders. A troop of large hideous lizards—some bright yellow, others a sallow gray, all sporting spines, scales, and surly faces—lay on a far rock, absorbing the sun. “Land iguanas from Las Encantadas, an archipelago six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador.” He rapped his knuckles on a firebox surmounted by a cylindrical boiler. Affixed to the curving walls, the attendant iron pipes pursued a loop apparently meant to supply the vivarium with steam heat. “Thanks to our furnace, these lizards suffer our English winters without complaint.”

        “Las Encantadas.” Chloe hummed the musical syllables. “So it’s an enchanted place?”

        Mr. Darwin nodded and said, “Sailors of long ago thought the islands went drifting magically about the Pacific Ocean when no one was looking.”

        He next led Chloe past a palisade of bamboo towards six colossal tortoises: primeval beasts with serpentine necks and plated shells, shambling amidst cactus plants so tall they bid fair to be called trees. The tortoises, too, traced to the Encantadas, he explained. In fact, these animals had given the islands their Spanish name, Galápagos.

        “I didn’t know a tortoise could grow so large,” said Chloe.

        “Until Man appeared in the Encantadas, these creatures had no natural enemies, and so they were free to become as big and blatant as they wished.”

        “How did you acquire such a menagerie?”

        “In my youth I joined the company of H.M.S. Beagle on its mission to chart the South American coastline. My duty was to provide the skipper with intellectual companionship, though I was nominally the brig’s naturalist—a position that, as you see, I took rather seriously. Our mockingbirds descend from bonded pairs I brought back from Galápagos, likewise our finches and vermillion flycatchers. The tortoises and iguanas are the very beasts I persuaded Captain Fitzroy to take on board. His officers were forever insisting we cook a specimen or two, but to the man’s credit he wouldn’t hear of it.”

        “How did you snare so many birds?”   

        “Most Galápagos creatures, including those with wings, are tame as lapdogs.” Mr. Darwin guided Chloe to a pond the size of the Adelphi stage. Several varieties of lizard, equal in ugliness to their terrestrial brethren, occupied the limpid depths and surrounding sandstone pylons. “Behold our marine iguanas. Initially I assumed their pond should be topped up with brine, but it happens they also thrive in fresh water. The job will find you helping my gardener, Mr. Kurland, in feeding the reptiles, cultivating the vegetation, providing nesting material for the birds, mucking out the place, and, come winter, supplying the firebox with coal—though your duties will extend to an intangible domain as well. I shall call it ‘affection.’ Mr. Kurland finds little to admire about my zoo. Mrs. Darwin is similarly unmoved. She thinks the tortoises stupid, the lizards grotesque.”

        “I shall treat your menagerie most tenderly,” said Chloe.

        “It’s the only point on which Mrs. Darwin and I disagree—well, that, and the immortality of the soul.”

        “Your wife is a freethinker?”

        “Quite the contrary.”

        “I see.”

        “She keeps exhorting me to join her and Master Willy and Miss Annie for Sunday services at St. Mary’s in the village,” said Mr. Darwin. “Alas, I cannot attend in good conscience. At one point my wife even convinced the Reverend Mr. Heathway to send me personal invitations via rock dove—the parson and I are both pigeon fanciers—but he gave up after my fifth expression of regret.” He rapped his walking-stick against a pylon, prompting its scaled occupant to dive into the pond with a great splash. “It’s settled, then—you shall be my assistant zookeeper!”

        “May I assume the position comes with a salary?”

        “Forgive my forgetfulness,” said Mr. Darwin, chiding himself with a smile. “Don’t tell Mrs. Darwin, but I mean to pay you what Miss Thorley will receive for tutoring the children, forty pounds every year.”

        Forty pounds, mused Chloe. Not enough to redeem Papa, and well below the sixty per annum she’d netted during the Adelphi Company’s halcyon days, but sufficient for staying alive whilst she devised a strategy for growing rich. “At a yearly rate of forty pounds, I shall give your birds and beasts the best Rousseauian education within my competence.”

        Mr. Darwin laughed melodically. “Rousseauian, you say? Splendid. We mustn’t corrupt these noble animals with civilization.”

        “Rest assured, I shall never equip an iguana with a pocket watch or send him off to work in a textile mill.”

        “As for my tortoises—promise me you’ll give them no cigars to smoke, spirits to drink, or waistcoats to wear.”

        “You have my solemn word.”

        “Miss Bathurst, you are obviously the right woman for the job.”

         #

         Later that afternoon she took the steam train back to London and retrieved from 15 Tavistock Street her most precious belongings, including her mother-of-pearl combs, her grandfather’s bayonet, and the gown of burgundy velvet she’d worn as the dauntless Françoise Gauvin in The Raft of the Medusa (she fully intended to return it one day), plus two items that would make splendid gifts for the eldest Darwin children—an Italian snow globe for Master Willy and a French doll representing Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Little Red Riding Hood, for Miss Annie (both tokens from suitors whose names she’d forgotten). The rooms were deserted, Fanny being at the theatre playing Pirate Mary, so Chloe left a note telling of her new situation as an assistant zookeeper and promising to send ten shillings each month. The irony did not escape her. For the past fourteen weeks Fanny had been meeting the landlord’s bill in toto, and only now, having moved elsewhere, would Chloe be paying her fair share of the rent.

        Even after a fortnight of caring for the Down House menagerie, she couldn’t say whether she was indeed the right woman for the job, but one fact was clear—Mr. Kurland, a gnarly wight of acerbic disposition, was ill suited to zookeeping. In his opinion maintaining the vivarium was demeaning work, the brute iguanas and loutish tortoises being ignoble substitutes for the cows and swine he thought he’d been hired to tend, while the birds were but “fiendish little devices through which the Devil contrives to squirt shite upon our heads,” and so he was happy to let Chloe make the vivarium her exclusive domain.

        Naturally Kurland never bothered learning the names Mr. Darwin had given his tortoises—but Chloe soon did: Boswell and Johnson from James Isle, Tristan and Isolde from Charles Isle, Perseus and Andromeda from Indefatigable. As for the lizards, they had yet to be christened, and so she set about bestowing biblical names on the aquatic iguanas and literary appellations on their terrestrial brethren, a task she performed with all the joy of Adam bringing taxonomy to Paradise.

        The economy of the zoological dome, Chloe soon realized, turned on its elaborate network of passion-flower vines, as well as its soaring stands of prickly-pear cacti. To nurture the vines, she routinely irrigated the soil with well water, thereby underwriting the survival of the tree-dwelling finches and arboreal mockingbirds, who feasted on the fruits and seeds. The cactus plants required little moisture, but she was obliged to spend many hours protecting the roots from moles—an essential task, for the low-hanging fruits were a favorite food of the tortoises, mockingbirds, and ground-dwelling finches. The land iguanas, meanwhile, preferred a menu of sunflowers, bluebells, and daisies, which she dutifully cultivated throughout the southwest sector.

        Although the marine iguanas eagerly consumed the kelp that thrived in the vivarium’s pond, under Chloe’s administration they learned to appreciate whatever produce the Down House cook, Mrs. Davis, whom everyone called Daydy, had deemed unfit owing to spoilage. To augment the tortoises’ diet, Chloe again turned to the detritus of Daydy’s kitchen. The carapaced reptiles would eat almost anything, from rotting apples to fish eyes, sausage casings to poultry viscera, though they utterly lacked a predatory instinct, cheerfully ignoring the vermillion flycatchers who perched so trustingly on their heads and shells.

        Beyond the Sisyphean task of keeping the zoo free of animal waste, the most unsavory of Chloe’s duties required her to scour the meadows for the remains of whatever hare, hedgehog, or badger the dogs had run to earth that week. Upon locating a carcass, she would put on canvas gloves, then use a tin pail to bear the foul thing and its attendant load of fly eggs to the vivarium. About half of the emergent maggots were consumed by the ground-dwelling birds, while the other half survived to become adult insects, which the flycatchers, true to their name, would snatch on the wing.

        And what of Chloe’s promise to form emotional bonds with the zoo’s denizens? In the case of the birds, affection came easily, for she never tired of watching them hopping amongst the passion-flower vines and cactus pads like bejeweled machines wrought by a meticulous wizard. The tortoises likewise charmed her, for they’d become in her imagination a kind of deputation advocating on behalf of all the world’s ungainly and misbegotten creatures. For a full two months she regarded the iguanas with distaste, but then they, too, won her over. Unapologetic in their homeliness, unrepentant in their self-absorption, these dragons seemed to be saying, “Love us for what we are, for we shall never be anything else”—and so she did.

        While Chloe looked to the welfare of Mr. Darwin’s reptiles and birds, Miss Thorley did the same for his offspring. Each morning beginning after breakfast, nine-year-old Willy and seven-year-old Annie learned about the world from their industrious governess. At one o’clock Miss Thorley would deliver Willy and Annie to the kitchen employees for a midday meal, after which the youngsters were free to play with their four siblings in the nursery or (if they so chose) assist Miss Bathurst in the vivarium. For Chloe the advantages of having a private staff were many. The arrangement not only reduced her work load, it also provided the reptiles and birds with a surfeit of nurturance—to say nothing of the fact that Willy and Annie were learning valuable lessons in animal husbandry and waste management.

        “I’ve always been partial to the name ‘Annie’,” Chloe told Mr. Darwin’s eldest daughter. “In my days as an Adelphi player, I received favorable notices for my interpretation of a pirate called Anne Bonney.”

        “You were an actress, Miss Bathurst?” gushed Annie, a child of sunny disposition and luminous intelligence. (She would never be so foolish as to wish for a wicked stepmother.) “How exciting!”

        “I trod the boards for nearly nine years, beginning when I was sixteen.” Chloe and Annie were crouched beside the vivarium’s furnace, watching Willy use a garden trowel to remove the ashes from the firebox preparatory to supplying it with fresh coal.

        “You played a pirate?” said the boy with uncharacteristic fervor. (He was normally as gloomy as his sister was effervescent.) “I like pirates. Did you ever disembowel anyone?”

        “Willy, that’s a horrid question,” said Annie.

        “On the stage I’ve skewered many a blackguard, but rarely in real life,” said Chloe, opening the knapsack containing the children’s gifts. “We shall now address a happier topic.” From the sack she produced the snow globe and passed it to Willy. Inside the sphere a comical scarlet Satan lounged on a golden throne. “This is for you, Master William.”

        “Is that the Devil himself?” asked Willy, cleaning his sooty hands by rubbing them on a passion-flower leaf. “I love it!” He shook the globe, causing porcelain chips to swirl through the trapped water—the proverbial snowstorm in Hell. “Begone, Lucifer! Willy Darwin has brought you a blizzard!”

        “And this is for you, Miss Annie,” said Chloe, retrieving the Red Riding Hood doll and pressing it into the child’s grasp. The doll’s ceramic face—a confluence of ruby lips, apple cheeks, and merry eyes—uncannily mirrored the features of the person in whose possession it now lay.

        “How lovely!”

        “She comes all the way from France,” said Chloe. “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.”

        Annie threw her spindly arms about Chloe and kissed her fleetingly on the lips. “Oh, Miss Bathurst, I shall treasure it always. Now if I only had a wolf.”

        “Tell Father to whittle you one,” grumbled Willy. “He does whatever you ask of him.”

        At this juncture Chloe was tempted to spellbind the children with the lurid and sardonic tale Willy’s snow globe inevitably called to mind, Mr. Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” But then she thought better of the idea, sensing that Mrs. Darwin would not approve, likewise the ghost of Monsieur Rousseau, so instead she simply asked her charges to assist her in dismantling the furnace pipes and purging them of soot.

* * *

        In time Chloe noted that an irony flourished within the noisy estate she now called home. The Charles Darwin who took such an inordinate interest in earthworms was condemned by certain infirmities to assume the posture of his beloved annelids. Although this horizontality doubtless served well for producing children, it surely frustrated his scientific endeavors (the botany projects he pursued in the potting sheds, the pigeon-breeding experiments he conducted in the backyard cotes, the barnacle dissections he performed in his study). On his worst days he was up and about for only two or three hours, after which, beset by a wracking headache and a high fever, he took to his couch, not far from the basin that, owing to his spells of vomiting, he was obliged to keep at hand, occluded by a Chinese screen.

        Not surprisingly, he rarely left the villa. Only once that autumn did he go to London, where he bought a cameo brooch for Mrs. Darwin and attended a meeting of the Geological Society. He much preferred that his colleagues come to him—and come they did. Amongst the illustrious visitors to Down House were the virile young botanist Mr. Joseph Hooker, recently returned from an expedition to the Antarctic, the affable Mr. John Gould, England’s greatest ornithologist, and the crusty Professor Charles Lyell, celebrated throughout Her Majesty’s realm for his Principles of Geology (a book that, as Mr. Darwin remarked to Chloe, “will be favorably impressing its readers even after the mountains for which it so eloquently accounts have turned to dust”). Occasionally the scientific triumvirate of Hooker, Gould, and Lyell spent the night, but usually they made a day trip of it, staying only long enough to partake of an afternoon meal. Because these luncheons normally occurred in the vivarium, Chloe oft-times found herself eavesdropping on the sages’ conversation (understanding but a fraction of what she heard), meanwhile pursuing her zookeeping tasks and supervising the children as they rode about the dome astride the tortoises like sheiks on camels.

        Gradually it dawned on her that the master of Down House was no less renowned than Professor Lyell, thanks largely to his book chronicling his journey around the world. When Chloe asked Mr. Darwin if she might peruse The Voyage of the Beagle, he lent her a copy of the third edition. Every night, upon retiring to her little room, she read another chapter. Having scant interest in coral reefs, barrier beaches, silicified trees, sea-slugs, cuttle-fish, or fossil quadrupeds, she skipped the sections treating of these subjects, savoring instead the scenes in which Mr. Darwin held center stage. In his youth he’d been quite the adventurer, galloping with gauchos across the Pampas, hacking his way through a Patagonian jungle seething with hostile Indians, and traversing the Andes on a mule. He’d survived a volcano in Chile, an earthquake in Concepción, and the mountainous seas off Cape Horn, which had nearly capsized his ship.

        But the most striking passages in The Voyage of the Beagle were the author’s fiery denunciations of chattel slavery, an institution Chloe herself had come to detest while appearing as the Southern belle Pansy Winslow in Lanterns on the Levee. “On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil,” Mr. Darwin wrote in the final chapter. “I thank God I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings when, passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured.” And then, a paragraph later, “These deeds are done by men who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that His will be done on Earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”

        The sacred imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount versus the sordid institution of the Christian slave-trade: so it appeared that Chloe’s employer, like she herself, was attuned to irony—a coincidence she planned to exploit to her father’s advantage. Here we are, sir, the most civilized nation on Earth, sending innocent folk to abominable workhouses, as if they’d deliberately arranged to be poor. One might as well imprison a malaria victim for having the audacity to run a fever. Do you not agree?

        She wondered what sum Mr. Darwin might be persuaded to donate to Papa’s deliverance. Certainly not the whole two thousand pounds. (A man will spend that much in acquiring a house but not on assuaging his indignation.) Perhaps she could convince him to part with two hundred. It is beyond your powers to liberate the Brazilian slaves, she would argue, and the American slaves as well, but you can help to save one blameless wretch from death by toil. Contribute to my fund, sir, and God will reward you with your first good night’s sleep in years.

* * *

        On the twentieth day in April, 1849, Mr. Darwin sponsored at Down House a luncheon of particular import, for this would be his last opportunity to see Mr. Hooker prior to the swashbuckling botanist’s departure on yet another plant collecting adventure. Chloe spent the morning mucking out the zoological dome, while Daydy passed the same interval preparing roasted joints of lamb, plus puréed turnips, stewed spinach, and broiled mushrooms.

        Upon their arrival, Mr. Darwin conducted the scientific triumvirate towards the vivarium. Parslow the butler followed with a salver holding ginger biscuits and three bottles of sherry wine. Entering the contrived jungle, Mr. Gould and Professor Lyell acknowledged the children with friendly waves—Master Willy was riding Johnson the tortoise, and Miss Annie had just mounted Isolde—whilst Mr. Hooker, as prepossessing as ever behind his spectacles, favored Chloe with an amiable wink.

        Shortly after the guests assumed their places at the linen-draped table, Mr. Gould and Mr. Hooker began conversing about a noxious phenomenon on which the Evening Standard had been reporting for the past four months. It concerned the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society: a band of young, wealthy, sybaritic Oxford graduates who’d recently acquired for their debauches a private manse in the heart of town. Under the guidance of Lord Rupert Woolfenden, the twenty Byssheans were staging at Alastor Hall a competition whereby they would award an immense cash prize of £10,000 to the first scholar, scientist, or theologian who could prove, or disprove, the existence of God.

        “What a scandalous project,” said the dour Professor Lyell, who’d evidently not heard of the prize despite its being, in Mr. Hooker’s words, “the talk of all London.”

        “I quite agree,” said the roly-poly Mr. Gould, pouring a glass of oloroso. “Though the problem is not without a certain, shall we say, philosophical interest?”

        “From my own perusal of the late Mr. Shelley, I infer that he possessed a first-rate mind.” Mr. Hooker availed himself of the amontillado. “True, it was reckless of him to write ‘On the Necessity of Atheism,’ though I feel that, in sending Shelley down for it, the University College officials displayed a decided want of imagination.”

        Chloe’s first instinct was to hustle Willy and Annie out of the zoo, lest they learn prematurely there was such a thing as atheism, but she elected to stay, partly because the children seemed oblivious to the scientists’ chatter, but mostly because the phrase “ten thousand pounds” held an intrinsic allure. After settling down beside the iguana pond, she distributed her attention amongst five activities: minding her charges, sipping tea, eating hard-boiled eggs, pretending to read a pamphlet entitled The Fruit Farmer’s Guide to Mole Management, and listening furtively to the gentlemen’s conversation.

        “You know what this damnable prize amounts to?” said Lyell, filling his glass with manzanilla. “It’s a ten-thousand-pound bounty on the head of God.”

        “Judas got but thirty pieces of silver,” said Hooker in a tone Chloe thought oddly jocular given the seriousness of the subject.

        “One might assume that on first principles these Oxford rakehells would skew the competition towards the atheist view,” said Gould, “and yet by the Standard’s account they happily entertain arguments on the Almighty’s behalf.”

        “But how do they sort the robust proofs of God from the feeble?” asked Lyell.

        “The same way they sort the substantive refutations from the trivial,” said Gould, sipping his wine. “Each contestant makes his case before a panel comprising three Anglican and three freethinking judges. The whole sorry circus convenes every fortnight, with a preselected theist and a corresponding unbeliever traveling to Oxford and presenting their arguments.” The ornithologist clamped a friendly hand on Mr. Darwin’s knee. “Charles, you’ve been strangely silent concerning the Great God Contest. Are you not outraged that these flâneurs would turn theology into a game?”

        “Nowadays I make a point of abstaining from outrage,” Mr. Darwin replied. “It’s bad for the digestion. That said, I feel bound to reveal that, were I to conduct the judges about my little zoo, I might very well collect the prize, provided they understood my commentary.”

        “I’ll wager I could understand it,” said Hooker, savoring his sherry. “Pray tell, sir, what manner of God proof lurks within your menagerie?”

        “Charles has in mind the Argument from Design,” said Lyell. “William Paley’s Natural Theology and all that. No watch without a watchmaker.”

        “You misunderstand me, gentlemen,” said Mr. Darwin, biting into a ginger biscuit. “I would win the contest by negating the Deity.”

        Somehow Chloe prevented a mouthful of tea from reversing direction and spouting out her nose.

        “Piffle,” said Lyell.

        “Needless to say, I have no intention of entering the competition,” Mr. Darwin declared. “For one thing, my wife would never hear of it.”

        “And for another, you’d be violating your own religious convictions,” said Lyell.

        “Up to a point,” said Mr. Darwin with a raffish smile.

        “Charles, you hold us on tenterhooks,” said Gould. “Please explain yourself.”

        “I cannot explain myself—only God, wherever He may be, can do that—but I shall attempt to explain my theory.” Mr. Darwin brushed biscuit crumbs from his lower lip. “Look about you, gentlemen, and you’ll see the Encantadas replicated on a small scale. A question springs to mind. Why did God treat each Galápagos island as if it were—almost, but not quite—a biologically sovereign realm? Why did He install slim-beaked warbler finches on Albemarle Isle but large-beaked ground finches on Chatham? Why do the tortoises on the northern islands have shells suggesting igloos, whilst the specimens on the southern islands have shells resembling saddles, and the centrally located creatures wear simple sloping shells? What’s more, when we travel to other equatorial archipelagos, why do we meet no reptiles or birds that mirror the Galápagos types?”

        “Scintillating questions,” said Gould.

        “As an analogy,” said Hooker, “I’ve often wondered why the Kerguelan cabbage, quite the most ridiculous of vegetables, flourishes in the Indian Ocean but nowhere else.”

        “Simply because God initially laid down a template for every species, that doesn’t preclude the emergence of variations, even ridiculous variations,” said Lyell. “When I consider how the Almighty built a benign plasticity into the scheme of things, my faith is renewed, not shaken.”

        “Spend a moment contemplating three marine iguanas from different Galápagos islands,” Mr. Darwin persisted, “and a conundrum presents itself. So utterly distinctive, these creatures, and yet so fundamentally similar. Miss Bathurst, will you please show us some living illustrations of this mystery?”

        Startled to be drawn into the conversation, Chloe dropped the hard-boiled egg she was about to peel. “Certainly, sir,” she said as the egg wobbled away. Gaining her feet, she stretched her arms over the iguana pond like a heathen priestess blessing its waters. “That red aquatic lizard is Jezebel from Hood’s Isle. Note also black Melchior from Tower. Our big multicolored fellow is Shadrack from Narborough.”

        “Three separate addresses, three kinds of coloration, utterly distinctive, fundamentally similar,” said Mr. Darwin. “And then one day, following the orbit of my sandwalk, I fell upon an answer. Like every other lizard known to science, the first iguanas to live in Galápagos were strictly terrestrial—but over the ages some colonies found it expedient to inhabit the archipelago’s coastlines, drawing sustenance from the sea. This natural transmutation process continued even after these iguanas became full-blown aquatic creatures, hence our red, black, and multicolored species. A similar story might be told of the three varieties of Galápagos giant tortoise. For example, Miss Bathurst?”

        Though once again caught off guard, she rose to the occasion, indicating the nearest tortoise with her index finger. “Domeshelled Boswell from James Isle”—she pivoted and pointed—”saddle-backed Tristan from Charles Isle”—again she pointed—”slope-backed Perseus from Indefatigable.”

        “Boswell, Tristan, and Perseus: all reasonably good swimmers and thus arguably sharing an ancestor that, once upon a time, inhabited South America,” said Mr. Darwin. “By riding the Humboldt Current westward from the mainland, one or two small but seaworthy tortoises could have reached the Encantadas, where in time their descendants became huge, for if no other animal regards you as prey, it matters not how conspicuous you appear. I would further hypothesize that our bright yellow, flat-spined terrestrial iguanas, found on a majority of islands, share a South American heritage with our sallow gray, high-spined iguanas, exclusive to Barrington.”

        “So your terrestrial iguanas can also swim?” asked Hooker.

        “Not very well, but that doesn’t tell against my theory. The ancestors of our land lizards could have traveled from the continent to Galápagos on uprooted trees or floating mats of vegetation.” Mr. Darwin moved his flattened hand up and down as would a raft adrift on ocean waves, then fluttered the fingers of the opposite hand in a pantomime of flight. “Now what of our birds? The anatomical evidence suggests that all four Galápagos mockingbird species sprang from a long-tailed type that flew over from Ecuador or Peru. In the case of our vermillion flycatchers, I believe that during my round-the-world journey I spotted the parent kind on the South American mainland, broader of wing than its Encantadas posterity and gifted with a heartier song. As for my finches, they’re probably all descended from a continental species called the blue-black grassquit.”

        “I could provide the judges with stuffed specimens of that very creature,” said Gould, draining his glass. “Not that I would ever make a bid for the Shelley Prize,” he added, so vehemently that Chloe thought perhaps he meant the opposite.

        “I’m hearing Buffon’s idea of allied species sharing a pedigree,” said Lyell. “I’m hearing Lamarck’s notion of evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But neither hypothesis constitutes a disproof of the God of Abraham.”

        “Not only do our two species of terrestrial iguana boast an ancestor in common with our aquatic iguanas,” Mr. Darwin continued in a tone of constrained exasperation, “but were you to travel back far enough in time, you would encounter an extinct creature that prefigured every variety of iguana to be found anywhere in the world. These primal lizards shared the Earth with primal turtles, primal snakes, and primal Crocodylia, all of them in turn sprung from a species of cold-blooded, egg-laying, scaly-skinned animal.”

        Mr. Gould switched allegiances, oloroso to manzanilla. “An archetypal reptile? How intriguing.”

        “Not archetypal, John, nothing so poetic and Platonic as all that,” said Mr. Darwin. “For it happens that our originary reptile in turn traces to a mutable stock of proto-reptiles.”

        “So where does it all end?” asked Hooker.

        “You mean, ‘Where does it all begin?’ By my lights the natural history of our planet is like a fantastically complex shrub or tree. Follow the twigs, and you’ll come to the branches, that is, to the first types of mammal, reptile, amphibian, and fish. But why stop there? Why not scurry along the branches until we reach the trunk, where we’ll meet the most primitive lineages yet, ancestral insects, crustaceans, mollusks, amoebas, and algae. The journey continues, ever downward, until finally, at the base of the trunk, we come upon a single, seminal form. Need I point out that we’ve long since parted company with Genesis chapter one? And there’s the rub, gentlemen. If God played no role in the cavalcade of life on Earth, from protozoans to primates, it behooves us to wonder why He goes to all the bother of existing.”

        “Good heavens, Charles, you really do have a shot at the Shelley Prize,” said Hooker. “If I were an Alastor Hall rakehell, I’d be impressed.”

        “My desire to impress those poseurs is nil. Ah, but here comes Parslow. Let us forget my eccentric speculations and enjoy Daydy’s culinary arts.”

        The butler entered the vivarium pushing a tea cart laden with the feast. Speaking not a word, he deposited generous portions of lamb and vegetables on each guest’s plate.

        “Come, come, Charles, is your Tree of Life really so outlandish an idea?” said Hooker. “Did not your illustrious grandfather Erasmus posit that all warm-blooded creatures arose from a single filament?”

        “That estimable savant could describe no mechanism of transmutation,” Mr. Darwin asserted, then added, clucking his tongue, “but I can.”

        “So can the Church of England,” said Lyell.

        “Tell us about your mechanism,” said Hooker.

        “I’d rather not. It’s like confessing a murder.”

        “You’re amongst friends,” said Gould. “We’ll help you bury the body.”

        “First lunch, then deicide,” said Mr. Darwin.

        By Chloe’s reckoning it took the sages a mere thirty minutes to consume a meal that the staff had spent four hours preparing. While the gentlemen ate, the children dutifully amused themselves, Willy ensnaring a cactus plant with the bola his father had brought back from Patagonia, Annie enacting a conversation between her Red Riding Hood doll and its lupine nemesis. (Mr. Darwin had indeed whittled a wolf for his eldest daughter, cloaking it in the dry and scraped pelt of a Derbyshire hare.) No sooner had the sages cleaned their plates than Parslow appeared, carrying a tray of puddings and a bottle of port.

        “I’m eager to hear about your momentous crime,” Hooker told the master of Down House, whereupon the butler blanched and hastily withdrew.

        “I’ll begin by making a naïve observation,” said Mr. Darwin. “Within any sexually reproducing population, the offspring vary, yes? My Annie, my Henrietta, and my Betty are not duplicates of Mrs. Darwin, nor do they mirror one another. In this phenomenon lies the success of those who seek to improve domestic livestock. Chance provides the breeder with unsolicited novelties that he proceeds to exploit, selecting who shall mate with whom—and thus perpetuating desirable characteristics. And so we get horses faster and stronger than their ancestors, sheep with thicker fleece, and cows of greater fecundity. I contend that, just as a man might produce a superior pig by design, so might Nature craft a better boar by accident.”

        “But how, Charles—how?” asked Gould, eating a forkful of apple tart.

        “Our planet is forever in flux. Even as we speak, the Earth’s face is changing through natural processes of erosion, sedimentation, and vulcanism. If that canny geologist Lyell were here, he would corroborate me.”

        “Pass the cherry tart,” said Lyell with a pained smile.

        “From an individual animal’s perspective, every alteration in its environment must be greeted with grave suspicion,” said Mr. Darwin. “Oft-times the creature finds itself standing by helplessly as temperatures plunge, food supplies diminish, plagues appear, and enemies flourish. But occasionally Nature favors an endangered population, gifting a few offspring with characteristics not only fortuitous but fortunate—a luxuriant pelt, equal to the harshest winter; a mighty jaw, stronger than the toughest nut; a hearty constitution, able to survive epidemics; elongated limbs, crucial for outpacing predators. Compared to their cousins, these lucky juveniles are more likely to survive into adulthood, find mates—”

        “And pass along the felicitous trait!” interrupted Hooker. “What a pretty hypothesis!”

        “Eventually the modification spreads through the population, giving rise to a new variety, type, race, or species,” said Mr. Darwin. “Whilst conducting the judges about my zoo, I would bid them notice the broad, flat tail of Shadrack the marine iguana, essential for propelling him towards his underwater kelp dinner. Did Shadrack’s parents have such an appendage? Most probably, which is why they lived long enough to make Shadrack. His distant round-tailed relations, however, lacked this advantage, and so they lost what the Reverend Thomas Malthus famously called ‘the struggle for existence.’ “

        “I must say, sir—your argument enjoys the merit of logic,” said Gould.

        “As did Satan’s presentation to our Savior,” said Lyell. “Forgive me, Charles. I didn’t mean to compare you to the Devil.”

        “Nor yourself to Christ, I trust,” said Mr. Darwin.

        The geologist scowled, licking cherry juice from his lips.

        “What other adaptations would you commend to the judges’ attention?” asked Gould.

        “The sturdy beaks of our ground-dwelling finches,” Mr. Darwin replied, “ideal for penetrating the fruits on which they feed. The slim beaks of our warbler finches, perfect for extracting insects from trees. The long bills of our Hood’s Isle mockingbirds, useful for cracking open nutritious booby eggs in their native habitat. The short bills of our Chatham mockingbirds, suited to consuming the palo santo seeds that sustained them back home. Finally, the arched shells of our saddleback tortoises, a modification that enabled them to reach the higher fruits on their beloved Charles Isle cactus plants.”

        “Have you committed your theory to paper?” asked Hooker.        

        Mr. Darwin snapped his fingers in the same emphatic fashion that had heralded his decision to offer Chloe a situation at Down House. “Miss Bathurst, would you please go to my study and rummage about in the desk, left side, lower drawer? You’ll find a sketch of thirty-five pages titled ‘An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification.’ “

        “I’ll fetch it straightaway, sir,” said Chloe, setting down her tea.

        “No, I don’t want the sketch. Retrieve what lies beneath—a manuscript called Towards a Theory of Natural Selection. In your absence I shall mind the children.”

        “As you might imagine, I have mounds of questions,” said Hooker. “The problem of blending, for example. If a male marine iguana boasting a powerful tail mates with a female of more feeble extension, wouldn’t their offspring inherit mediocre tails?”

        “Not to mention the problem of time,” said Lyell. “The drama you’re describing would have taken many millions of years to unfold. Can our planet truly be so ancient? I’m delighted that my book made buttered eggs of Bishop Ussher’s six-thousand-year-old Earth, but really, sir, you’re talking about a considerable slice of eternity.”

        “Then there’s the problem of Man,” said Gould. “Are you impish enough to apply this theory to our origins? Yes, Charles, you wily son of a monkey, I believe you are.”

        “Excellent questions, all three, and quite possibly fatal to the theory of natural selection,” said Mr. Darwin. “Let me offer my provisional answers.”

* * *

        Chloe left the zoological dome in a state of frothing frustration, for she greatly desired to know how Mr. Darwin would address the objections raised by the scientific triumvirate. Anyone wishing to claim the Shelley Prize with a disproof of God—herself, for example—must be prepared to speak of blending, time, and Man. This hypothetical contestant could not allow a pious judge to wreck her case by appealing to regressive lizard-tails, a young planet, or a Supreme Being’s decision to bless His favorite creatures with rational intellects.

        Of course, she had no intention of simply stealing her employer’s theory. That would be wrong. Also, it might not work. After all, she’d comprehended barely half of what Mr. Darwin had told his guests, so it was likely that, unless she received instruction from the master transmutationist himself, the Anglican judges at Alastor Hall would succeed in befuddling her. No, the ideal scheme would find her traveling to Oxford only after Mr. Darwin had endorsed her project and tutored her in the nuances of his disproof.

        Entering the study, she found the manuscript in the specified location, nestled beneath the crumpled, tea-stained, thirty-five-page sketch from which it had descended. She snatched up Towards a Theory of Natural Selection and scurried away, leaving “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification” in place. By the time she was back in the vivarium, Mr. Darwin had dispensed with blending, time, and Man. Now he was talking about crustaceans.

        “That’s right, Joseph. The male of the Chonos Isles barnacle has two organs of procreation.”

        “Two?” said Mr. Hooker. “I find it difficult enough maintaining one.”

        Catching sight of Chloe, Mr. Darwin cut the conversation short with an embarrassed laugh. “Ah, Miss Bathurst, there you are. Kindly deliver my theory to our botanist.”

        She quirked Mr. Hooker a smile and placed the pages in his grasp.

        “Impressive,” he said, leafing through the manuscript. “But I shan’t have time to read it ere I embark for India.”

        “Take it with you, Joseph,” said Mr. Darwin. “Last month I paid a scrivener to transcribe a fair copy, which I keep under lock and key. I’ve instructed Emma to publish it upon my death. Were you to mislay these pages, I shouldn’t count the loss a tragedy.”

        “Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to protect them,” said Hooker.

        “Charles, you’ve found a convert,” said Gould.

        “I’m scarcely converted,” said Hooker. “Merely curious.”

        “Miss Bathurst, I suspect you found our scientific chatter impossibly tedious,” said Mr. Darwin.

        “Au contraire, I thought the conversation entrancing,” she said.

        “Such a sweet girl you’ve hired, Charles,” said Lyell in a treacly tone. “I’ll wager she’s intelligent, too. I pray you, Miss Bathurst, give us your opinion of this Tree of Life business.”

        “May I speak freely, sir?”

        “Of course,” said Lyell.

        “I think Mr. Darwin’s idea makes a ripping good yarn,” said Chloe, acting the part of a person who understood transmutationism. “As to its truth or falsity, I am not competent to venture a conclusion—but I must say I shan’t ever look at a finch’s beak, a mockingbird’s bill, a tortoise’s shell, or a lizard’s tail in quite the same way again.”

        And with that the four gentlemen issued merry guffaws and returned to their pudding, though Professor Lyell laughed last and ate least.

Copyright © 2015 James Morrow

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James Morrow is a two-time World Fantasy Award winner and a two-time Nebula Award winner. His latest comedic extravaganza, Galápagos Regained, has received much advance praise, including a starred Library Journal review that concluded, “It’s almost a crime for a novel to be as much fun as this one is.” New York Times bestselling author Wilton Barnhardt called Morrow’s new effort “a witty and wisecracking Victorian adventure, an Indiana Jones caper with Charles Darwin lurking in the wings, as if Jules Verne was retold by Tom Stoppard,” while Nebula and Hugo-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi found Galápagos Regained to be “a riotous conflation of Candide and Around the World in 80 Days.”

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COVER ART

“Ancient Threshold,” by Sam Burley

Sam Burley is a matte painter turned illustrator and is believed to currently reside on the continent of North America. Eye-witness reports describe him as a tall, stick-like, camera-wielding figure staring at the sky or driving around aimlessly with his dog named Rygel. On rare occasions he has been glimpsed careening through the air by any of several flimsy and horribly unnatural means of flight, apparently laughing. If seen, approach with caution… and preferably root beer. View more of his work online at samburleystudio.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

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Copyright © 2015 Firkin Press

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