The Origin of Species (46 page)

He set about erecting the tarp outside that he slept under when it rained.

“Did you see him, that fucking murderer?” Desmond said. “If he touches me again I’ll take a hatchet to him, I swear it!”

By morning the rain had stopped, and the sun rose blood-red over Isabela against a cloudless sky. Santos set about his fishing as if Alex and Desmond didn’t exist, offering no breakfast and making no move to bring them ashore. Desmond, bloody-minded, unleashed the panga and angled it off the cabin roof on his own. It slipped from his grasp and looked as if it would plunge nose first into the water, but somehow it righted itself and landed, with a thunk, almost perfectly square.

Santos watched all of this with a steely glare.

“Give me a minute,” Desmond said, conspiratorial. “Then we’ll get the bloody hell out of here.”

He dragged three of his bags out of the cabin.

“We don’t need all that stuff,” Alex said.

“Just keep your fucking mouth shut.”

There was a beachhead not a few hundred yards from the boat, but Desmond made away from it, rowing around a curve in the shoreline until Santos’s boat had disappeared from view. Alex already felt sick with the thought of what Desmond was up to.

“We’ve got the panga, don’t you see? If the weather stays clear we can set out tonight and be free of the bastard.”

“Set out for where, exactly?”

“I’ll row the thing to the fucking mainland if I have to.”

Something had to be done, maybe, before they ended up slitting one another’s throats, but sneaking off in this cockleshell was not it. It was madness. It was suicide.

“I’m not coming. I’m staying behind.”

Desmond didn’t even trouble himself to take this seriously.

“With that animal? You’ve got to be joking.”

He could still make a go at Punta Espinosa. It was half a day’s walk, at most, he’d seen it the previous day from the slopes, an oasis of green and tiny lakelets.

“I left all my things behind. You didn’t exactly warn me.”

“Well, we didn’t want to rouse his suspicions, did we?”

Alex ought to have set out on his own the minute they hit the shore. He had his moneybelt with him and his little survival kit, complete with a cupful or so of leftover rice. Yet he was still clinging to the notion that things would come right in the end, that there was still hope. Hope for what, he couldn’t say, maybe simply that all this was not an unmitigated
disaster, was just another lark, something he’d laugh about in the fullness of time and add to his repertoire of travel stories. Hope that, despite the longing he always had to be made over, he’d somehow come through all of this unchanged.

“Why wait for night? Why not start rowing now?”

“Don’t be daft. The bastard would just come after us. Anyway, I want to go back into the crater. There’s something there, I’ll bet my mother on it, I can feel it in my bones. Always follow your instincts, my boy.”

Follow your instincts
. What could that mean, coming from Desmond? If Santos had followed his instincts the night before, he would have snapped Desmond’s neck.

None of Alex’s alternatives seemed things that someone like him would actually do: taking to the ocean with Desmond or setting off on his own with his cup of rice or even returning to Santos, who would probably force some unspeakable act on him the second they were alone and then drop his used corpse into the sea. It was as if he had strayed into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s life. He wasn’t used to facing choices like these, ones that really mattered.

“We’ll hide the boat up shore a bit,” Desmond said. “In case he comes looking.”

Desmond dragged the panga up the beach, not even waiting for Alex’s help, and stowed it behind a clump of bush. They left most of Desmond’s things with it, including his water—to save for the trip, he said—though by the time they had struggled up to the rim of the crater, they had polished off most of Alex’s, as much from hunger as thirst.

Desmond, the whole way up, had gone on about getting their story straight.

“They’ll believe us before they believe that triceratops, I’ll tell you that. That is, if we’re consistent.”

“But what about your plants? They’ve already seen them.”

“Well, we’ll just have to hope we don’t run into the same cunt as before, won’t we?”

They started down into the crater along the path they had used the previous day, though part way down Desmond veered off into a rift that snaked back upward. It brought them to a narrow shelf, from which Desmond shimmied down along a bank of scree to an even narrower one below, barely a few feet across.

“Hand down my case, would you?”

It looked to Alex as if they were painting themselves into a corner. Beneath Desmond the cliff face dropped off almost sheer all the way to the crater floor, with no hint of a navigable trail.

“Where are we going, exactly?”

“You can stay behind if you don’t think you can manage it,” Desmond said.

Alex got onto his belly and snaked his way down the slope to where Desmond waited. He was just filling time now, was just stalling, following Desmond in the hope his mind would clear before he had to make a decision. At the bottom of the slope he leaned his weight cautiously onto the ledge until he was sure it would hold, but felt his head spin when he stood—just a step away was empty space.

“We need to make that ridge,” Desmond said, nodding to an outcrop that rose up just beyond where their ledge tapered away to nothing beneath a hill of scree.

The only way over to the ridge was across the scree. For perhaps two lethal yards it sloped out uninterrupted over the cliff edge—one false move then, and they would go sluicing down to the crater floor.

“This is crazy,” Alex said. “We should go back.”

But Desmond had already started out.

“Just dig in your heels. Something to tell the folks back home.”

Somehow Desmond managed to slither across. At the ridge, he reached out to the rock and a piece of it broke away in his hand. Alex was sure he was about to lose his traction, but he managed to inch himself upward and get a solid hold. He swung his case up onto the ridge, then pulled himself up after it.

“Piece of cake,” he said breezily. “Come on, I’ll give you a hand.”

For one awful instant when Alex was hanging on the slope all his volition failed him, and a tickle ran up his spine like the scratch of death’s very fingernail. But then he had somehow grabbed hold of the ridge. Desmond’s arm failed to appear, and he had to heave himself up on his own. Behind him he caught a glimpse of a cloud of debris spraying out into the crater.

Desmond was standing well back from the edge.

“Didn’t want to risk the extra weight.”

They were on a wide shelf jutting out from the crater wall, uncommonly lush with growth.

“Saw the place with my bins,” Desmond said. “Looks like it must have escaped the last eruption.”

It was a strange spot, only a few hundred feet from the rim but not accessible from it, the crater wall towering over it so forbidding and sheer it seemed about to topple onto it. The only access to it seemed to be the way they’d come by, the rest of it cut off by the cliffs. The dusting of green that covered it was mostly grasses, though here and there were patches of leafy trailers and of tiny plantlings as pale and insubstantial as cloud.

In front of them the crater yawned and yet the place had an air of separateness and seclusion like a cavern.

Desmond was already on his haunches scrabbling amidst the growth.

“More fucking ash,” he said, sour-faced. “I feel like a bloody chimney sweep.”

Despite himself, Alex felt something droop in him on Desmond’s behalf. It would all come to nothing, all his busy chasing across the islands and ferreting out.

He wandered off on his own, doing his own little half-hearted investigations.

“Careful!” Desmond snapped. “Don’t muck up the waters.”

Toward the crater wall the rock dipped away into an old satellite cone, maybe a dozen feet across, the floor of it a lifeless bed of rippled lava. But in the scree along one of its slopes, Alex spied a little field of spindly growth, spread as even and thin as a mesh.

He felt a flutter.

“There’s something here,” he said.

“Eh? What is it?”

Something in him wanted to keep the find from Desmond, for a moment at least.

“Some plants. Maybe you should look at them.”

Desmond rose up irritably. “Don’t touch them! Give me a minute! They’re probably nothing, mind you, it’s too shady over there for anything good.”

He climbed to the edge of the crater and stood next to Alex, looking down at his find.

“Jesus bloody Christ.” It seemed the first time he had ever been this still, that he hadn’t seemed to hum with noxious energy. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

There was such a tone of reprieve in his voice, of thankfulness almost, that Alex actually felt a twinge of embarrassment for him. He became all business now—he brought his case over and in a matter of minutes had sorted through his plants and tossed out a good half of them, as if all the attentions he had lavished on them for days and weeks had been nothing.

“Wish I’d brought some of my fucking tools.” He’d started brushing away scree around the edges of the plants. “We’ll just have to manage by hand.”

He worked with the painstaking carefulness of an archeologist. He had his toothbrush with him in his satchel and he used it to sweep away at the base of the stems, uncovering twisted taproots with the slenderest filaments branching away from them like the translucent cilia of tiny sea creatures. He took up two, three, half a dozen of them, making a place for them in his case. They were already in flower, tiny white-petaled blooms radiating out from the little stemlets like constellations. When Alex had come upon them they had seemed such scrawny things, but under Desmond’s ministrations they grew weirdly intricate and substantial.

“I could fucking smell them here,” Desmond said. Alex’s role in their discovery seemed already well on the way to oblivion. “This is bloody research, not sitting in your fucking office by the green while your bumboys review the literature for you.”

Alex took a seat at the edge of the cone while Desmond finished his work. He wondered if the excitement of the moment would seem silly in a week’s time. They had found a bunch of weeds was all; hardly anything worth risking your life for. Maybe in the entire world there were a dozen people who could even have named them. That Desmond was one of them cast a shadow over the entire lot.

At the bottom of a hill of chalky rubble near where Alex was sitting was another little web of spidery plants.

“What’re these things?”

“Just leave them, I’ve got my bloody hands full at the moment.”

Alex went down for a closer look. They seemed the sibling outcasts of the stuff that Desmond was digging at, flowerless and practically leafless.

Desmond was suddenly standing over him.

“I told you to leave them, for fuck’s sake.”

He squatted to the plants and pulled one up as carelessly as if it were a dandelion or a bit of clover.

“Just runts, like I suspected. It’s the fucking ash.”

But something had caught his eye.

“Fucking root.” He touched a finger to one of the tendrils branching away from the taproot. “That’s odd.”

He pulled up another of the plants, more cautiously this time. It came up the same, with a taproot leading down, though some of the tendrils led off a couple of inches or more through the ash, fine as cobwebs.

Desmond held the thing against his palm.

“Look at those roots.” Alex wasn’t sure what he was getting at. “It’s fucking odd.”

He retrieved his case, seeming taken over now.

“Look at the difference.” He laid one of the plants from the satellite cone next to the newer one. All Alex saw was that the second was a sort of laggard version of the first, its leaves stunted and small and its buds still tight as tiny fists.

“I can’t believe it,” Desmond said. “Look at the roots. Look at the laterals. It’s fucking obvious, once you see it.”

The second’s roots were a little more scraggly than the first’s, but not in a way Alex would have called obvious.

“It’s a variation, don’t you see?” Alex didn’t think he’d heard this tone in Desmond before, so absent of guile. “Out rather than down.”

Alex still wasn’t sure if he followed.

“It’s not mollugo, then?”

“It’s fucking mollugo, all right. Only different. An adaptation. Probably some bastard seed that normally would have just died out on the rocks but wafted over here instead, and liked what it found. A bloody chance in a billion.”

“So it came from the others?”

“It doesn’t fucking matter where it came from, don’t you see? A bloody mouse could have carried it over, or maybe Bowinger’s right and some bird shat it out from bloody Peru. That’s not the point—the point is it’s an adaptation. It’s fucking adapted to ash.”

He began to pull up another, working with his toothbrush again.

“There they are, you see? Those laterals at the base of the stem. That’s new, I tell you, I’ve never seen it.” He ran a fingertip along one of
the tendrils as if petting some frail alien pet. “This is what it’s about, boy. The origin of species. The fucking evolutionary jackpot.”

He was busy again. This time he dumped out his remaining sesuvium—what had been the linchpin, Alex thought, of his grand scheme, of his magic wide cross—and then slowly replaced it with his new mollugo, which he extracted from the ground as if it were nitroglycerine, tenderizing the ash with his toothbrush and then gently blowing it away from the roots. When he ran out of niches in the case he began to throw out mollugo as well, what was left of the older ones and even some from the satellite cone, until the little clump in the ash had been practically halved.

“Mustn’t take too many,” he said. “The fucker’ll take over the whole island in a few years, if we’re lucky. Quicker than fucking crabgrass.”

But he kept at it, one more, then another, until his case was crammed with specimens, three or four to a niche. There couldn’t have been a dozen plants remaining in the ground when he was finally able to bring himself to stop.