Free Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

broad estuary of the Thames, its prow cutting into tidal waters the color of green tea: tropical, at least this time of year. Like visiting Bombay or Bihar. Certainly not like coming home.
    He thought of the cargo rocking in the holds below. Coal from South Africa, India, Australia, a precious commodity in this age of rebellion and the fraying Empire. Tools and dies from Canada. And hundreds of crated Lee-Enfield rifles from the factory in Alberta, all bound for Kitchener’s Folly, New London, making a safe place in the wilderness, for the day when an English king was restored to an English throne.
    The rifles were Watson’s responsibility. As soon as the ship was moored at the primitive docks he ordered his men — a few Sikhs and grumbling Canadians — to cinch and lift the pallets, while he went ashore to sign manifests for the Port Authority. The heat was stifling, and this crude wooden town was not by any stretch of the imagination London. And yet to be here brought home the reality of the Conversion of Europe, which for Watson had been a faraway event, as strange and as inherently implausible as a fairy tale, except that so many had indisputably died.
    Certainly this wasn’t the country he had sailed from a decade ago. He had graduated from public school without merit and taken training from the Officer Corps at Woolwich: exchanged one barracks for another, Latin declensions for artillery maneuvers. In his naïveté he had expected G.A. Henty, a dignified heroism, Ndebele rebels fleeing the point of his sword. He had arrived instead at a dusty barracks in Cairo overseeing a rabble of bored infantrymen, until that night when the sky lit up with coruscating fire and the quaking earth shook down the British Protectorate in Egypt, among so many other things. An aimless enough life, but there had been the consolations of friendship and strong drink or, more tenuously, of God and Country, until 1912 made it clear that God was a cipher and that if He existed at all He must surely have despised the English.
    Britain’s remaining military power had been concentrated on shoring up her possessions in India and South Africa. Southern Rhodesia had fallen, Salisbury burning like an autumn bonfire; Egypt and Sudan were lost to the Moslem rebels. Watson had been rescued from the hostile ruins of Cairo and placed on a hideously crowded troop transport bound for Canada. He spent months in a relocation barracks in the tall-timber country of British Columbia, was transferred at last to a prairie town where Kitchener’s government-in-exile had established a small-arms factory.
    He hadn’t been an exceptional officer before 1912. Had he changed, or had the Army changed around him? He excelled as a sort of Officer Corps shop steward; lived monkishly, survived bitter winters and dry, enervating summers with a surprising degree of patience. The knowledge that he might as easily have been beheaded by Mahdists enforced a certain humility. Eventually he was ordered to Ottawa, where military engineers were in demand as the reconstruction gathered momentum.
    It was called “reconstruction” but it was also called Kitchener’s Folly: the founding of a new London on the banks of a river that was only approximately the Thames. Building Jerusalem in a green and unpleasant land. Only a gesture, critics said, but even the gesture would have been impossible if not for the crippled but still powerful Royal Navy. The United States had put forward its arrogant claim that Europe should be “free and open to resettlement and without borders” — the so-called Wilson Doctrine, which meant in practice an American hegemony, an American New World. The German and French rump regimes, gutted by conflicting claims of legitimacy and the loss of European resources, backed down after a few shots were exchanged. Kitchener had been able to negotiate an exception for the British Isles, which provoked more protest. But the displaced remnants of Old Europe,