`Gentlemen!' he bellowed. `Some of you already know what this is about, eh? We're going to force a history on Roundworld! It's one that should be there already! Something is trying to kill it, gentlemen. So if someone wants to stop it happening, we want to make it happen all the more! You will be sent into Roundworld with a series of tasks to do! Most of them have been made very simple so that wizards can understand them! Shortly our missions for tomorrow, should you chose to accept them, will be given to you by Mr Stibbons. If you do not choose to accept them, you are free to choose dismissal! We're starting at dawn! Dinner, Second Dinner, Midnight Snack, Somnambulistic Nibbles and Early Breakfast will be served in the Old Refectory! There will be no Second Breakfast!'
Over a chorus of protest he went on: `We are taking this seriously, gentlemen!'
12. THE WRONG BOOK
OUR FICTIONAL DARWIN HAS A lot more in common with the `real' one - the Darwin of the particular timeline that you inhabit, the one who wrote The Origin and not The Ology - than might at first be apparent. Or plausible. The irresistible force of narrativium induces us to imagine Charles Darwin as an old man with a beard, a stick, and a faint but definite hint of gorilla. And so he was, in his old age. But as a young man he was vigorous, athletic, and engaged in the kind of exuberant and not always politically correct activities that we expect of young men.
We've already learned of the real Darwin's amazing fortune in getting on board the Beagle and remaining there, culminating in his boundless delight at the geology of the coral island of St Jago. But there are other crucial nodalities, points of intervention, and thaumic occlusions in that version of Roundworld's historical record, and the wizards are exercising extreme care and attention in the hope of steering history through, past, and around these causal singularities.
For example, the Beagle really did come under fire from a cannon. When the ship tried to enter the harbour at Buenos Aires in 1832, one of the local guard ships fired at it. Darwin was convinced that he heard a cannonball whistle over his head, but it turned out that the shot was a blank, intended as a warning. FitzRoy, muttering angrily about insults to the British flag, sailed on, but was stopped by a quarantine boat: the harbour authorities were worried about cholera. Incensed, FitzRoy loaded all of the cannons on one side of his ship. As he sailed back out of the harbour he aimed them all at the guard ship, informing its crew that if they ever fired at the Beagle again, he would send their `rotten hulk' to the seabed.
Darwin really did learn to throw a bolas, too, on the pampas of Patagonia. He enjoyed hunting rheas, and watching the gauchos bring them down by entangling a bolas in their legs. But when he tried to do the same, all he managed was to trip up his own horse. The Origin might have vanished from history's timeline then and there, but Darwin survived, with only his pride hurt. The gauchos found the whole thing hugely amusing.
Charles even took part in suppressing an insurrection. When the Beagle reached Montevideo, shortly after the cannonball incident, FitzRoy complained to the local representative of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, who promptly set sail for Buenos Aires in his frigate HMS Druid to secure an apology. No sooner had the warship disappeared from view than there was a rebellion, with black soldiers taking over the town's central fort. The chief of police asked FitzRoy for help, and he dispatched a squad of fifty sailors, armed to the teeth ... with Darwin happily bringing up the rear. The mutineers immediately surrendered, and Darwin expressed disappointment that not a shot had been fired.
No expense, then, has been spared to bring you historical truth, inasmuch as so weighty a characteristic as truth can be attributed to something as ethereal as history. Except for the giant squid, of course. That happened in a different timeline, when the malign forces were getting extremely desperate and strayed into Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea through some obscure warp in L-space.
The most important similarity between the two Darwins is less exciting, but essential to our tale. The real Charles Darwin, like his fictional counterpart, began by writing the wrong book. In fact, he wrote eight wrong books. They were very nice books, very worthy ... of great scientific value ... and they did his reputation no harm at all... . but they weren't about natural selection, his term for what later scientists would call `evolution'. Still, that book was brewing merrily away in the back of his mind, and until he was ready to bring it off the back burner, he had plenty of other things to write about.
It had been FitzRoy who had put the idea of authorship into his head. The Beagle's captain had signed himself up to write the story of his round-the-world voyage, based on the ship's log. He had also agreed to edit an accompanying book about a previous survey by the same vessel - the one where Stokes had shot himself. As the Beagle headed north-west from Cape town, stopped briefly at Bahia in Brazil, and turned north-east across the Atlantic towards its final destination in Falmouth, FitzRoy suggested to Darwin that the latter's diary might form the basis of a third volume on the natural history of the voyage, completing the trilogy.
Darwin was nervous but excited at the prospect of becoming an author. He had another book in mind, too, on geology. He'd been thinking about it ever since his revelation on the island of St Jago.
As soon as the ship had returned to England, FitzRoy got married and went on honeymoon, but he also made an impressive start to his book. Darwin began to worry that his own slow writing would delay the whole project, but FitzRoy's early enthusiasm soon ground to a halt. Between January and September 1837 Charles worked flat out, overtook the captain, and towards the year's end he sent his finished manuscript to the printer's. It took FitzRoy more than a year to catch up, so Darwin's contribution was held back, finally seeing the light of day in 1839 as volume 3 of the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS. Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, with the subtitle Volume 3: Journal and Remarks, 1832-1836. After a few months the publishers reissued it on its own as journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle. It may have been the wrong book, but writing it had one very useful effect on Darwin's thinking. It forced him to try to make sense of all the things he had seen. Was there some overarching principle that could explain it all?
Next came his geology book, which eventually turned into three: one on coral reefs, one on volcanic islands, and one on the geology of South America. These established his scientific credentials and led to him winning a major Royal Society prize. Darwin was now recognised as one of the leading scientists in the land.
He was also making ever more extensive notes on the transmutation of species, but he still was in no hurry to publish. Quite the contrary. Elsewhere, political forces were at work aiming to destroy the influence of the Church, and one of their key points was that living creatures could easily have arisen without the intervention of a creator. Darwin, being (at that point in his life) a good Christian, was totally averse to anything that might seem to ally him with such people. He could not publicly espouse transmutation without risking serious damage to the Anglican Church, and nothing in the world would induce him to contemplate that. But his deep insight about natural selection wouldn't go away, so he continued developing it as a kind of hobby.
He did mention the insight to various scientific friends and acquaintances, among them Lyell, and also Joseph Dalton Hooker, who didn't dismiss the idea out of hand. But he did tell Darwin, `I shall be delighted to hear how you think this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on this subject.' And he later said, rather acerbically, that `No one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely examined many.' Darwin took this advice to heart and cast around for new species to become an expert on. In 1846 he sent the final proofs of his geology books back to the printer and celebrated by collecting the last bottle of preserved specimens from the Beagle voyage. At the top of the bottle he noticed a crustacean from the Chonos Archipelago - a barnacle.