Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

boss directed him, with the workmen forming a skirmish line between the road and the cleared lot. The sun was warm, the smoke chokingly thick whenever the wind reversed. Guilford had started to wonder whether the waiting would go on all afternoon when one of the laborers shouted “ ’Ware!” and faced the clearing, knees braced, his frayed wooden post at quarter-arms.
    “Buggers live in the earth,” the crew boss said. “Fire boils ’em out. You don’t want to get in the way.”
    Beyond the workers he saw motion in the charred soil of the clearing. Stump runners, if Guilford remembered correctly, were burrowing hive insects about the size of a large beetle, commonly found among the roots of older mosque trees. Seldom a problem to the casual passerby, but venomous when provoked. And fiercely toxic.
    There must have been a dozen flourishing nests in the clearance.
    The insects came from the earth in mounds and filled the smoldering spaces between the fires like shimmering black oil. The clearing yielded several distinct swarms, which turned, collided, and wheeled in every direction.
    The beaters began pounding the dirt with their posts. They pounded in unison, raising clouds of dust and ash and shouting like madmen. The crew boss took a firm grip on Guilford’s arm. “Don’t move!” he roared. “You’re safe here. They’d attack us if they could, but their first concern is moving their egg sacks away from the flames.”
    The beaters in their high boots continued punishing the earth until the stump-runners paid attention. The swarms rotated around the brush fires like living cyclones, pressed together until the ground was invisible under their combined mass, then turned away from the tumult of the beaters and flowed into the shadows of the forest like so much water draining from a pond.
    “A loose hive won’t last long. They’re prey for snakes, scuttlemice, billy hawks, anything that can tolerate their poison. We’ll rake the fires for a day or two. Come back in a week, you won’t recognize the place.”
    The work continued until the last of the creatures had disappeared. The beaters leaned panting against their posts, exhausted but relieved. The insects had left their own smell in the smoky air, a tang of mildew, Guilford thought, or ammonia. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, realized his face was covered with soot.
    “Next time you come away from town, outfit yourself for it. This isn’t New York City.”
    Guilford smiled weakly. “I’m beginning to understand that.”
    “Here for long?”
    “A few months. Here and on the Continent.”
    “The Continent! There’s nothing on the Continent but wilderness and crazy Americans, excuse me for saying so.”
    “I’m with a scientific survey.”
    “Well, I hope you don’t plan on doing much walking with ankleboots like those on your feet. The livestock will kill you and whittle your pins.”
    “Maybe a little walking,” Guilford said.
     
    He was glad enough to find his way back to the Pierce home, to wash himself and spend an evening in the buttery light of the oil lamps. After a generous supper Caroline and Alice disappeared into the kitchen, Lily was sent to bed, and Jered took down from his shelf a leather-bound 1910 atlas of Europe, the old Europe of sovereigns and nation. How meaningless it had come to be, Guilford thought, and in just eight years, these diagrams of sovereignty imposed on the land like the whim of a mad god. Wars had been fought for these lines. Now they were so much geometry, a tile of dreams.
    “It hasn’t changed as much as you might think,” Jered said. “Old loyalties don’t die easily. You know about the Partisans.”
    The Partisans were bands of nationalists — rough men who had come from the colonies to reclaim territory they still thought of as German or Spanish or French. Most disappeared into the Darwinian bush, reduced to subsistence or devoured by the wildlife. Others practiced a form of banditry,