Unfortunately, few sea captains welcome the company of woebegone, hunchbacked, unfriendly little island dogs on their ships. Most had simply refused Roger, and thus sailed on without Alma, delaying her journey considerably. Even when they had not refused, Alma sometimes had been required to pay double fare for the privilege of Roger’s company. She paid. She sliced open yet more hidden pockets in the hems of her traveling dresses, and pulled out yet more gold, one coin at a time. One must always have a bribe.
Alma did not mind the onerous length of her journey, not in the least. In fact, she needed every hour of it, and had welcomed those long months of isolation on strange ships and in foreign ports. Since her near-drowning in Matavai Bay during that raucous game of haru raa puu, Alma had been balancing on the keenest edge of thought she had ever experienced, and she did not want her thinking disturbed. The idea that had struck her with such force while she was underwater now inhabited her, and it would not be shaken. She could not always identify whether the idea was chasing her, or whether she was chasing it. At times, the idea seemed like a creature in the corner of a dream—drawing closer, then vanishing, and then reappearing. She pursued the idea all day long, in page after page of scrawling, vigorous notes. Even at night, her mind tracked the footsteps of this idea so relentlessly that she would awaken every few hours with the need to sit up in bed and write more.
Alma’s greatest strength was not as a writer, it must be said, although she had already authored two—nearly three—books. She had never claimed literary talent. Her books on mosses were nothing that anyone would read for pleasure, nor were they even exactly readable, except to a small cadre of bryologists. Her greatest strength was as a taxonomist, with a bottomless memory for species differentiation and a bludgeoningly relentless capacity for minutiae. Decidedly, she was no storyteller. But ever since fighting her way to the surface that afternoon in Matavai Bay, Alma believed that she now had a story to tell—an immense story. It was not a cheerful story, but it explained a good deal about the natural world. In fact, she believed, it explained everything.
Here is the story that Alma wanted to telclass="underline" The natural world was a place of punishing brutality, where species large and small competed against each other in order to survive. In this struggle for existence, the strong endured; the weak were eliminated.
This in itself was not an original idea. Scientists had been using the phrase “the struggle for existence” for many decades already. Thomas Malthus used it to describe the forces that shaped population explosions and collapses across history. Owen and Lyell used it as well, in their work on extinction and geology. The struggle for existence was, if anything, an obvious point. But Alma’s story had a twist. Alma hypothesized, and had come to believe, that the struggle for existence—when played out over vast periods of time—did not merely define life on earth; it had created life on earth. It had certainly created the staggering variety of life on earth. Struggle was the mechanism. Struggle was the explanation behind all the most troublesome biological mysteries: species differentiation, species extinction, and species transmutation. Struggle explained everything.
The planet was a place of limited resources. Competition for these resources was heated and constant. Individuals who managed to endure the trials of life generally did so because of some feature or mutation that made them more hardy, more clever, more inventive, or more resilient than others. Once this advantageous differentiation was attained, the surviving individuals were able to pass along their beneficial traits to offspring, who were thus able to enjoy the comforts of dominance—that is, until some other, superior, competitor came along, or a necessary resource vanished. During the course of this never-ending battle for survival, the very design of species inevitably shifted.
Alma was thinking somewhat along the lines of what the astronomer William Herschel had called “continuous creation”—the notion of something both eternal and unfolding. But Herschel had believed that creation could be continuous only at the scale of the cosmos, whereas Alma now believed that creation was continuous everywhere, at all levels of life—even at the microscopic level, even at the human level. Challenges were omnipresent, and with every moment, the conditions of the natural world changed. Advantages were gained; advantages were lost. There were periods of abundance, followed by periods of hia‘ia—the seasons of craving. Under the wrong circumstances, anything was capable of extinction. But under the right circumstances, anything was capable of transmutation. Extinction and transmutation had been occurring since the dawn of life, were still occurring now, and would continue to occur until the end of time—and if that did not constitute “continuous creation,” then Alma did not know what did.
The struggle for existence, she was certain, had also shaped human biology and human destiny. There was no better example, Alma thought, than Tomorrow Morning, whose entire family had been annihilated by unfamiliar diseases brought upon them by the Europeans’ arrival in Tahiti. His bloodline had nearly been rendered extinct, but for some reason Tomorrow Morning had not died. Something in his constitution had enabled him to survive, even while Death had come harvesting with both hands, taking all others around him. Tomorrow Morning had endured, though, and had lived to produce heirs, who may even have inherited his strengths and his extraordinary resistance to illness. This is the sort of event that shapes a species.
What’s more, Alma thought, the struggle for existence also defined the inner life of a human being. Tomorrow Morning was a pagan who had transmuted into a devout Christian—for he was cunning and self-preserving, and had seen the direction the world was taking. He had chosen the future over the past. As a result of his foresight, Tomorrow Morning’s children would thrive in a new world, where their father was revered and powerful. (Or, at least, his children would thrive until another wave of challenge arrived to confront them. Then they would have to make their own way. That would be their battle, and nobody could spare them it.)
On the other hand, there was Ambrose Pike, a man whom God had blessed fourfold with genius, originality, beauty, and grace—but who simply did not have the gift of endurance. Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield. He had spent his life longing for the eternal, the constant, and the pure. He desired an airy covenant of angels, but was bound—as is everyone and everything—by the hard rules of nature. Moreover, as Alma well knew, it was not always the most beautiful, brilliant, original, or graceful who survived the struggle for existence; sometimes it was the most ruthless, or the most lucky, or maybe just the most stubborn.
The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.
Alma called her idea “A Theory of Competitive Alteration,” and she believed she could prove it. Naturally, she could not prove it using the examples of Tomorrow Morning and Ambrose Pike—although they would live forever in her imagination as outsized, romantic, illustrative figures. Even to make mention of them would be grossly unscientific.
She could, however, prove it with mosses.
Alma wrote quickly and copiously. She did not slow down to revise, but would simply tear up old drafts and begin again from scratch, nearly every day. She could not slow her pace; she was not interested in slowing her pace. Like a besotted drunk—who can run without falling, but who cannot walk without falling—Alma could only propel herself through her idea with blind speed. She was afraid to slow down and write more carefully, for she feared she might tumble over, lose her nerve, or—worse!—lose her idea.