Free Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

Sullivan seemed to know where he was going. He had been here in 1918, he said, cataloging some of the marshland species. “I know the town, though it’s bigger now, and I met a few of the old hands.”
    The people they passed looked rough-hewn and dangerous. The government had begun handing out homestead grants and paid passage not long after the Miracle, but it took a certain kind of person to volunteer for frontier life, even in those difficult days. Not a few of them had been fugitives from the law.
    They lived by fishing and trapping and their wits. Judging by the visible evidence, fresh water and soap were in short supply. Men and women alike wore rough clothing and had let their hair grow long and tangled. Despite which, several of these shabby individuals looked at Sullivan and Guilford with the amused contempt of a native for a tourist.
    “We’re going to see a man named Tom Compton,” Sullivan said. “Best tracker in Jeffersonville, assuming he isn’t dead or out in the bush.”
    Tom Compton lived in a wooden hut away from the water. Sullivan didn’t knock but barged through the half-open door — Darwinian manners, perhaps. Guilford followed cautiously. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness he found the hut sparse and clean-smelling, the plank floor dressed with a cotton rug, the walls hung with various kinds of fishing and hunting tackle. Tom Compton sat placidly in one corner of the single room, a large man with a vast, knotted beard. His skin was dark, his race obviously mixed. He wore a chain of claws around his neck. His shirt was woven of some coarse local fiber, but his trousers appeared to be conventional denim, half-hidden by high waterproof boots. He blinked at his visitors without enthusiasm and took a long-stemmed pipe from the table by his elbow.
    “Bit early for that, isn’t it?” Sullivan asked.
    Tom Compton struck a wooden match and applied it to the bowl of the pipe. “Not when I see you.”
    “You know why I’m here, Tom?”
    “I’ve heard rumors.”
    “We’re traveling inland.”
    “Doesn’t concern me.”
    “I’d like you to come with us.”
    “Can’t do it.”
    “We’re crossing the Alps.”
    “I’m not interested.” He passed the pipe to Sullivan, who took it and inhaled the smoke. Not tobacco, Guilford thought. Sullivan passed the pipe to him, and Guilford looked at it with dismay. Could he politely refuse, or was this something like a Cherokee summit meeting, a smoke instead of a handshake?
    Tom Compton laughed. Sullivan said, “It’s the dried leaves of a river plant. Mildly intoxicating, but hardly opium.”
    Guilford took the gnarly briar. The smoke tasted the way a root cellar smells. He lost most of it to a coughing fit.
    “New hand,” Tom Compton said. “He doesn’t know the country.”
    “He’ll learn.”
    “They all learn,” the frontiersman said. “Everybody learns. If the country doesn’t kill ’em first.”
     
    Tom Compton’s pipe smoke made Guilford feel lighter and simpler. Events slowed to a crawl or leaped forward without interval. By the time he found his bunk aboard the Argus he was able to remember only fragments of the day.
    He remembered following Dr. Sullivan and Tom Compton to a wharfside tavern where brown beer was served in steins made from the boles of dried flute reeds. The steins were porous and would begin to leak if you let them sit too long. It encouraged a style of drinking not conducive to clarity of thought. There had been food, too, a Darwinian fish draped across the plate like a limp black stingray. It tasted of salt and mud; Guilford ate sparingly.
    They argued about the expedition. The frontiersman was scornful, insisting the journey was only an excuse to show the flag and express American claims to the hinterland. “You said yourself, this man Finch is an idiot.”
    “He’s a clergyman, not a scientist; he just doesn’t know the difference. But he’s no idiot. He rescued three men from the water at Cataract